Going Beyond Volunteering
Last Wednesday, the Washington Post covered the release of a new report issued by the Corporation for National and Public Service, indicating that volunteer rates are on the rise, especially among young people, despite worsening economic times.
According to the Post article, “the number of 16- to 24-year-old volunteers rose 5 percent, from 7.8 million to 8.2 million. The number of applications to AmeriCorps, which puts people to work full time in nonprofit groups for a year, increased 217 percent over the past eight months.”
On the one hand, it isn’t surprising that application rates for AmeriCorps are up—new college graduates often look to such programs as avenues for gaining meaningful experience in a difficult job market. Yet the original report doesn’t tell us why numbers are up. Perhaps it’s not simply a bad hiring climate, as I’ve speculated, but the presence of a community organizer in the White House, or a residual effect of Hurricane Katrina, which occurred at a formative time for these young people.
It may also be due to the movement on many college campuses today to educate students for personal and social responsibility. What do we know about the college-going subset of this 16- to 24-year-old demographic?
In fall 2007, AAC&U surveyed nearly 24,000 students at twenty-three colleges and universities that were part of a project called Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility. We asked the students specifically about how their campuses were—or were not—stressing the importance of contributing to a larger community, particularly as part of the regular teaching and learning that goes on in the curriculum and cocurriculum.
The good news, which aligns with the findings in the CNCS report, is that nearly 50 percent of our sample of students strongly agreed that they came to college aware of the importance of contributing to the greater good. Nearly 60 percent strongly agreed that contributing to a larger community should be a major focus of their institution, and this endorsement increases from first to senior year.
Likewise, one-half of the sample strongly agreed that their campus offers opportunities for contributing to a larger community. When asked to name examples, these students found no shortage of programs to cite: day of service events, alternative spring break trips to areas devastated by floods and other calamities, fund-raising events, clothing and canned-food drives, tutoring school children, youth sports camps, and on and on.
Yet when asked if contributing to a larger community currently was a major focus of their institution, only 40 percent of students strongly agreed, and the percentage drops from first to senior year. And despite recognizing that opportunities exist, only 19 percent of students reported frequent involvement in community-based projects connected to their courses, and only 25 percent reported frequent involvement in community-based projects not connected to their courses.
Even more troubling, only one-third of the sample felt strongly that their awareness of the importance of contributing to a greater good had expanded while in college, that the campus had helped them learn the skills needed to effectively change society for the better, or that their commitment to change society for the better had grown while in college.
I wonder, based on these findings, if colleges and universities have operated for too long under the mantra, “if we build it, they will come.” We need to find ways to involve many more students in our existing service-learning and community service programs, and to help them understand structures and systems and root causes of problems, alongside more immediate, and ameliorative, relief action. We also need to find ways to support faculty and student affairs educators in building opportunities that increase in sophistication over students’ educational careers, so that students move beyond having their awareness raised to having their skills developed and their commitments deepened.
Otherwise, I fear the college graduates among the 217 percent growth in AmeriCorps applicants may be ill-equipped to tackle what awaits them.
These findings and an analysis of the entire survey results will be published in a new AAC&U report, “Civic Responsibility: What is the Campus Climate for Learning?” to be released at AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal conference, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, October 1-3, 2009, in Minneapolis, MN.
