^ So why didn’t you teach the kid some of the foundation math skills he was lacking during the time you worked with him, @halcyonheather ? Can’t build the third story of a house if the foundation isn’t there first.
I think kids and adults SHOULD do some unskilled labor. I, have participated in the Habitat for Humanity program and worked on builds even though I have never built anything before. They NEED unskilled labor, even if a racehorse is pulling a milkcart.
If people used half the time they put into making excuses into actually doing something that made a difference in the world, this would be a better place. I have limited patience who think their time is too valuable or are worried about breaking a nail (rhetorical).
I love volunteering but would not require it of college students unless it was part of a scholarship or other program. Even then I think the requirements should be spelled out.
First, I suspect OP’s question may not be as innocent as it sounds. If you want to dispute comm service, start with churches, temples, and other places of worship that value assisting those with needs, hands on. Then the community organizations and nonprofits that seek to do good, then high schools. And, med or law programs that ask for pro bono work.
Second, the idea this is '“sprung on” unsuspecting freshmen just underscores how little kids know about their targets. Boo hoo.
Plenty of efforts don’t require a high level of skill. They do, however, need awareness and compassion, a willingness to see beyond your own selfish wants, and give to others. For free.
And yes, comm service through college, wisely chosen, can be part of a new grad’s resume. That’s not the default, low energy, “had to do it.”
"Prospective students and their parents should be made aware of the requirement for community service and it behooves prospective students to inquire about it. How many students don’t know about the requirement? "
It’s hard for me to be sympathetic to anyone being surprised by a college’s requirements whether volunteering, academic, PE, campus rules, etc. One needs to be an educated consumer and do their homework.
Halcyon says that some students ‘have to work many hours every week to pay for school and possibly support their families.’ I agree with this, as this represents the majority of students today. Less well-off students are already at a disadvantage in having to turn down unpaid internships because they cannot afford to work for free. I wonder if there is a bias, a misconception, that most college students are rich kids who should be forced to volunteer in poor communities to see how the other half lives. We’ll teach you some empathy, like it or not!
OP asks if colleges have an ulterior motive for requiring community service. It certainly gives the college great publicity. Why don’t colleges pay the students for work that the colleges are getting credit for?
‘I think kids and adults SHOULD do some unskilled labor.’ Well, someone could say everybody should got to church every Sunday, or people should exercise daily, or read War and Peace, or make their beds every day.
We are talking about community service here, @PetulaClark, giving to others - not whether you should read a book or floss your teeth (the latter is, per some recent study, apparently up for debate)
Comm service was a major part of my kids’ learning and growth in college and directly affected their post grad directions and offers. Yes, it’s in their résumés, for now.
It’s not as if colleges that require or offer this are leaving kids to hitchhike to some address where they do no good. They support, match kids, can provide transportation, etc. And sometimes make it part of what work study is.
@jym626, You feel strongly about community service. Others may feel everybody SHOULD protest the existence of abortion clinics, or SHOULD tithe, or give to the United Way or Planned Parenthood. And these can all be seen as giving to others, by the holder of those opinions.
@halcyonheather wonders about ‘doing more harm than good because I’m given work that requires skills I don’t have.’ I can see that possibility. What seems more certain is that the volunteer will feel good about himself, knowing he can log these hours and turn them in to the college. Like the hours students had to chart all through high school to impress adcoms. Bottom line, if anyone wants to do volunteer work, that’s fine. It should be volunteering, not required.
“Halcyon says that some students ‘have to work many hours every week to pay for school and possibly support their families.’ I agree with this, as this represents the majority of students today. Less well-off students are already at a disadvantage in having to turn down unpaid internships because they cannot afford to work for free. I wonder if there is a bias, a misconception, that most college students are rich kids who should be forced to volunteer in poor communities to see how the other half lives. We’ll teach you some empathy, like it or not!”
I work at a college and this absolutely describes the majority of our students. It’s also one of the biggest hurdles to getting our 4 year graduation rate higher. Even with extensive financial aid, they still need to work and sometimes they take 12 credits instead of 15 to fit it all in. Most of our students are paying their own way and that includes food, transportation, tuition…everything.
Volunteer work IS a part of specific programs, but they earn credit doing it.
And then there is Berea College which is only open to lower income students, provides full scholarships to all of them, and has a community service requirement.
I think we’re making a mountain out of a molehill here, though. We’re not talking about a permanent part-time job that would take away from valuable study time or forced labor on a road crew. Based on the descriptions @jym626 posted above, we’re talking 20-60 hours over four years with a variety of service options to choose from. That’s 2.5-8 hours each semester. In other words, less than an hour a week. (If we’re comparing time spent, I’m pretty sure I do spend more than 2 hours brushing and flossing over a four-month period of time.)
There are lots of forms that service can take:
Yes, it could be of the unskilled variety. At D’s school all freshmen participate in a “day of service” during orientation week. They clean up the cemetery next to campus, play games with the elderly, and get local grade schools ready for students to arrive on the first day of school later in the month. It’s one day, and I think most would agree it’s time well-spent. NU even has a pre-orientation program that new freshmen pay extra for that includes four or five days of volunteering in various capacities all over the City of Chicago. There’s a waiting list to get in.
Volunteering also could be part of a broader service orientation through ECs. That could take the form of teaching dance to 3rd graders or answering phones in a mental health clinic. Or it could involve raising money through on-campus organizations. That’s a major part of Greek life, at many schools, but other ECs also include “giving back” among their activities. In fact, most of my daughter’s friends are doing “volunteer” work of one kind or another as part of their general campus involvement. Again, it’s adding to rather than detracting from the learning environment.
Or it could be more specialized and more related to a student’s course of study. I recently read a profile of one student who after volunteering as a tutor and finding it difficult to address the needs of kids with different learning styles “designed a credit-based course to help himself and others learn specific pedagogy that works best with the unique students of the City School District”. His volunteer activity led to something that not only won him accolades but that will probably look extremely interesting to future employers when he starts to look for a job in education. Again, a good use of his limited time.
If nothing else, I think most college students could benefit from a good dose of reality. I remember being a “poor graduate student” who often bemoaned how overworked and underpaid I was. Until I started volunteering in a community outreach clinic. Seeing up-close and personal, how my “poverty” differed from the real poverty that people around me were living in put things in perspective for me.
Trying to bring donating to religious institutions or womens clinics is off topic, off the mark and inappropriate in this conversation @PetulaClark. Lets stay on topic.
@Elliemom’s post is spot on. My younger s’s volunteer work was with inner city kids chemistry class. They led some classes and did some rocket demonstrations with the kids. I don’t recall how many hours it involved. Older son did a lot of work with Engineers Without Borders. For years. Even after he graduated. Yes, my family is very committed to volunteer service. What I do pales in comparison to what DH does. And both s’s won community service awards when in HS our large metro area for what they did. They did it for years, and years. They are, AFAIK, the only siblings ever to have been selected (and in separate years) . Yes I am proud. So do I have little patience for those who can’t be bothered with helping others? Yes. Its a little hard to accept that college students are so self important that they cant help others. If they are in Greek life, they will likely have some community service activity. I applaud this.
Of course I tried (by starting at the very beginning, repeating myself, explaining things in different ways, asking questions, working through examples, etc.), but it’s very likely that he didn’t understand me. He needed help from professional educators, and he wasn’t getting enough of it. I can’t speak for that specific case, but kids in general are likely to have problems beyond the scope of what I can address (e.g. an undiagnosed learning disability).
Some volunteering, like picking up trash or boxing food at the food bank, really is unskilled labor (and many college students do unskilled labor for pay as well). Other volunteer opportunities, especially when it comes to education, should not be treated as unskilled work because helping students who have been underserved by the education system their whole lives is not just a matter of knowing the content. But they throw us in there without training just because we’re “smart.”
I would support an intelligently constructed service requirement. The school would need to consider its demographics and the logistical difficulties students might face, as well as the students’ general mindset and how that might affect the quality of their service. (For example, kids at my school are sometimes unhealthily obsessed with academics. And it’s an expensive private school in the middle of what is mostly a poor area, so there’s an unbecoming “us and them” mentality that sometimes surfaces.) It would distinguish between skilled and unskilled service (maybe requiring a certain amount of both), providing training and sometimes academic credit for the former. For the benefit of low-income students, I would allow community-focused work-study jobs to count toward the requirement (and the school might need to work with local non-profits to create these jobs).
Ironically, many lower SES folks are out there doing direct work with those who need help, through their religious groups.
HH, you ran into a situation that may have been beyond your skills. I vol somewhere now, where this occurs and the level of critical emotional support people need exceeds my experience. But we can find ways, do what we can. For what my girls did in college, there were various choices. None were picking up trash. A little anecdote, precious to me: at graduation, some of the kids they had helped showed up to fete the members of the team. On their own.
Many schools do allow work study to cover community work. Many give a credit for the experiences. OP’s phrasing suggests it’s unfair to expect. But helping others can be part of our whole lives.
@“Erin’s Dad” Berea is a great opportunity for a small number of students. And they are getting full scholarships, while the great majority of lower-income students are working to put themselves through school and/or taking out loans. They do not have the option of tuition-free college in exchange for volunteer work and community service.
I find mentioning Berea was prescient and adds to the scope of the thread.
Especially since it seems that not that many colleges actually have such a requirement. Perhaps a few more do if internship requirements are included, but even adding those may not add up to very many colleges.
Alice Lloyd is another school similar to Berea. There are also several schools that offer work learning options (work to defray tuition over and above Federal work study). These are all great options for the right students.
@jym626 Am I off topic, off the mark and inappropriate to the thread?
OP asked ‘How about career education first, community service later?’ OP posited ‘The best thing a college can do for the community is to educate their students in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Then provide students with support in finding a job or getting into grad school. Focus on providing a great experience in the classroom. Keep their loans to a minimum. This would be a real gift to the community.’
I happen to agree with OP. Let the kids finish college first.
It sounds like you had a rewarding experience with Habitat for Humanity. Others will have different ways to improve the lives of others. I was not talking about giving to churches. What about attending a Black Lives Matter rally? Does that count as community service? Or will the college have an ‘approved’ list of volunteer opportunities? And how are these related to publicity for the college? Again, I believe volunteering should be voluntary (with the exception of a school like Berea, where community service is built into the fabric of the school’s mission).
Let me hasten to add that at Tulane, it is called Service Learning, not volunteering, and it is integrated into the courses. Students must complete two service learning courses to graduate, but they do get credit hours. Not surprisingly, this was born out of Katrina. This requirement is made completely clear to all potential students.
I could go on for hours about this @halcyonheather, but suffice it to say that one of my D’s service learning areas has been enormously helpful in her interviews for the most competitive internships (Department of State, who specifically pointed out the work she did as matching with the kind of work they had in mind for her 2 summers in DC and Taipei) and for jobs. So I think that addresses in part your concern about this distracting from the ultimate goal of being employable. I would also echo and emphasize those that have said that if being required to do community work or service learning is a bummer for that student, then just go somewhere else. How hard is that?
You are right, IMO, that going to university should be a big step in getting ready for life. I disagree vehemently if you think that in the modern world, with all we have learned and know about inequalities and need, this consists only of the ivory tower studying of a subject, no matter the subject. ALL areas of academia have something to offer to improve the human condition, and seeing that first hand is clearly the best way.
Students CHOOSE their service learning course, so it would be foolish to choose something that isn’t directly in their lines of interest and expertise. Even schools where it is “compulsory volunteering”, no doubt have hundreds of areas to select from. This seems like a very weak argument to me.
Exactly, despite the incendiary examples, which experience shows can lead to off topic posts, even though as examples they are not off topic themselves. So let’s all stay on topic. And the answer is simple. Any school that requires service learning or “forced” volunteering should now be stricken from the list of schools to which that student applies. If they choose to go to such a school, they are agreeing to those Terms of Attendance. Much like all who sign up for this site are agreeing to the Terms of Service. If you don’t, find another site. Repeating myself, how hard is that?
If a student is going to spend 4 years at a place where they hope to have the premier educational and social experiences of their life, not to mention in most cases spending (or the family is) many thousands of dollars, it is absolutely incumbent on them to know at least the basics of what is required to graduate, if not much more. I agree with those that would have zero sympathy for anyone that accepted a school’s offer of admission without knowing at least that much of what they were getting into. AND YET, even if that happens, if they are that opposed to giving of their time in whatever fashion the school dictates, there is also transferring. Presumably they wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
Getting back to the OP’s core premise, I strongly believe that a true education involves not only a student’s major in, let’s say for example, history, but that student should also be reasonably exposed to courses in math, science, business, the arts, and foreign languages and/or cultures. Being exposed to the application of one’s education into the community, be it the local community or one half a world away, seems like an excellent extension of that concept that fits today’s world. If one thinks of college only as a trade school, then of course that makes no sense. But they are not trade schools, those are real and separate things. College is learning for a lifetime, or at least should be IMO.