When people say things like “Of course we don’t do X, we go to UVM!” or “Of course we love Y, it’s UVM!”, it’s typically meant to be a joke. And that makes sense—without the humor, the behavioral policing behind these statements would be obvious.
It’s not uncommon to hear students here categorize behaviors, interests, and aesthetics into the dichotomy of “UVM” or “not UVM.” This ought to sound absurdly reductive, but here, people accept it like it’s an anthropological observation.
The standards for what makes someone UVM aren’t primarily academic; in fact, they’re hardly about academics at all (save for the lack of people at UVM who plan to work in the fracking industry). No—these standards are about how people spend their time, present themselves, and shape their social lives, and they can be summed up with one word: granola.
The look is instantly recognizable: an outdoorsy, “hipster” style of progressivism. Patagonia, L.L.Bean, The North Face, Carhartt, and Burton dominate, combined with thrifted finds, flannel and corduroy in earth tones, worn denim, and curated stickers on Nalgene bottles.
But granola culture goes beyond just clothing—it’s a way of life. Weekdays are for skiing trips, weekends for camping and more skiing. While not everyone fits perfectly into this mold, these traits form the school’s cultural foundation.
Once you realize it, you notice it everywhere. In a Niche student poll, the most common descriptors for the “typical student” are “granola” (19%), “ski bum” (11%), “stoner” (9%), “hippie” (6%), and “hipster” (5%), collectively making up 51% of responses. This doesn’t mean only 51% of students at UVM are granola—it means that for 51% of poll respondents, granola and granola-adjacent terms were the primary labels for a typical UVM student.
That’s because within UVM’s culture, these categories stem from the same granola roots. Each draws from the same set of habits and priorities: an outdoor lifestyle, alternative aesthetics, progressive branding, and a shared palette of music, clothes, and weekend activities. The labels may vary, but for all of them, the core is fundamentally granola.
Those who identify with this definition of granola may insist it’s not a culture, just a label for personal values. Maybe that’s true on paper, but that’s not how it’s experienced by those on the outside.
The 2025 Campus Climate Survey reveals that 78.1% of students rate UVM as “somewhat” or “very” inclusive—a number that, at first glance, appears comfortably high. But the way those responses are distributed tells a stranger story. Instead of a smooth rise from low scores to high ones, the graph has two distinct peaks. The larger one is easy to explain: the concentration of answers landing in the 4/5 and 5/5 ratings, marking a strong sense of inclusion for a wide group. The other is more curious: a full 10.5% of students planted their response at a 2 out of 5 (“somewhat uninclusive”), a spot more crowded than both the lowest score and the neutral middle. It’s an unusual pattern. Rather than representing a fringe of deeply unhappy students, it points to a stable, mid-level dissatisfaction embedded in UVM’s environment, experienced daily by a substantial number of us.
As if that’s not enough, 16.5% of students rated UVM as either “somewhat uninclusive” or “very uninclusive.” That’s one in six students. Thousands of people walking around campus every day feeling that they don’t fully belong here.
Granola culture at UVM is like English in the U.S.: plenty of people speak other languages, but English is the default you have to navigate within. At UVM, if you want to successfully navigate social life, you have to speak granola. As one college admissions forum post states: “UVM is a very specific demographic… It’s a very ‘crunchy’ school… [if] you’re not outdoorsy or alternative to some extent you might struggle to find your people.”
At UVM, these granola identity markers are as unavoidable as the Green Mountains that surround campus.