Carol Geary Schneider

Carol Geary Schneider is president emerita of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.

Under her leadership, AAC&U launched Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), a public advocacy and campus action initiative designed to engage students and the public with what really matters in a college education for the twenty-first century. Additionally, under her leadership, AAC&U has become widely recognized as both a voice and force for strengthening the quality of student learning in college for all students and especially those historically underserved in U.S. higher education.

While a vice president at AAC&U in the 1990’s, Dr. Schneider headed a major initiative at AAC&U on higher education and U.S. pluralism, American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy and Liberal Learning. Dr. Schneider has published extensively on all the major areas of her educational work and has taught at the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Chicago State University and Boston University.

Since the fall of 2020, she has devoted most of her time to the formation of a new college civic learning initiative, the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition (CLDE). The Coalition is a collaboration among five major higher education organizations: AAC&U, Campus Compact, College Promise, Complete College America, and State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO),, which is partnering with dozens of higher education organizations, including the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, all the institutional accreditors, and several state systems. The CLDE goal is to ensure that making college-level civic and democracy learning expected, inclusive, and empowering for today’s diverse learners.

From 2017 through 2021, Dr. Schneider was an advisor to Lumina Foundation, assisting with their efforts to make higher learning a catalyst for underserved student talent development.

Dr. Schneider is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College with a bachelor's degree in history (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). She studied at the University of London's Institute for Historical Research and earned the PhD in history from Harvard University. She also has received fourteen honorary degrees, was the 2011 recipient of the ACPA's Contribution to Higher Education Award, the 2013 recipient of the NAC&U Ernest L. Boyer Award, the 2014 recipient of the University of Pennsylvania's Zemsky Medal for Innovation in Higher Education, the 2016 President’s Medal recipient from the Charles and Stella Guttman Community College, and has been honored as one of Diverse Magazine’s “25 Leading Women in Higher Education."