The SFCC administration announced on Friday that the school has been invited to participate in a national program that aims to rate universities based on their commitment to environmentally sound practices.
SFCC President Jackson Sasser said he felt his institution would make the grade.
"It's just the culture and the ethic of this college," Sasser said.
The program, called the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System, or STARS, is sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
Julie Garrett, faculty adviser to the student group Saints for Sustainability, said SFCC has been a member of the association since March.
More than 400 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada are practicing members, Garrett added.
Of those schools, 80 were invited to participate in the STARS program.
Beginning in February, those 80 institutions will internally evaluate how sustainable they are based on a set of questions provided by the association, Garrett said.
Areas of focus include water and landscape management, fair labor practices, sustainability literacy, recycling and transportation.
The evaluations will be done throughout the year and will be completed by Dec. 31.
Judy Walton, the association's acting executive director, said this year will be treated as a pilot phase for STARS, and formal ratings won't be given until 2009.
She said that the ratings are probably going to be based on a scale of one to four stars.
"This is going to be good because in the future, students can look and see how green the colleges that they are interested in are," Garrett said.
The STARS program will also help institutions figure out how to make their campus more sustainable, she added.
Sasser said the program fits in well with SFCC's priorities. He said he believes it is a crime to send students out into the world without teaching them to be environmentally aware.
"Our unflagging interest is that every student leaving Santa Fe has some appreciation of the value of sustainability," Sasser said.
