Top colleges come up short on community service

INTRO TEXT

Like all freshmen involved in work-study programs at the College of the Holy Cross, Philip Colvin got his first assignment in Dining Services. Four times a week, he sat in front of a computer and tracked the eight-digit-identification-coded travels of jelly doughnuts and chocolate-chip cookies from the bakery to dining halls and conference rooms. But unlike most of the 1 million students in the Federal Work-Study Program, who spend their entire undergraduate careers as a cog in the college bureaucracy, Colvin discovered during his junior year that he could also earn work-study money through community service.

He now earns financial aid through a “serve-study” position with Student Programs for Urban Development, an on-campus organization that facilitates the volunteer work of over 600 Holy Cross students at 37 social-service agencies in the city of Worcester. Colvin coordinates the fleet of vans that bring student volunteers to their off-campus service sites. “I really enjoy working for the public sector of Worcester,” he says. “I’d much rather have a work-study position in community service, which doesn’t just serve the Holy Cross community, but also serves the community of Worcester as well.”

Colvin’s experience of earning work-study aid through community service is not a new idea. From its inception in 1964, the Federal Work-Study Program has provided students with the choice of part-time employment within the institution itself, in government, or in nonprofit organizations. The number of work hours is determined by a student’s level of need, and the earned wages are used at the student’s discretion.

Source: report by the Corporation for National and Community Service, June 2002

In recent years, there’s been a steadily increasing emphasis on students earning aid through off-campus service. In 1992, the government mandated that at least 5 percent of each institution’s federal work-study monies be allocated toward employment in community service, and in 1998 Congress increased the requirement to 7 percent. Currently, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana are calling for a 25 percent minimum, as outlined in their still-pending Call to Service Act. President George W. Bush raised the stakes even higher, calling for a community-service requirement of 50 percent–an idea that has garnered stout opposition in financial aid offices across the country.

But as The Washington Monthly reported last winter, not every school meets the already established 7 percent mandate. In his article “The Other College Rankings,” Joshua Green revealed huge differences in compliance rates during the 1999-2000 academic year. At the top, Florida Memorial College allotted 59.2 percent of its work-study funds for community service, while Massachusetts’s own College of the Holy Cross had the worst showing in the country: 0.6 percent. According to Green, the nation’s best schools in academics are generally among the weakest in community service. Among the 20 universities judged by U.S. News and World Report to be the best in the country, 15 fell below the national average for funding community service with work-study funds–with MIT, Brown University, and Dartmouth College near the bottom of the list. (Stanford University fared the best among the 20.)

How do schools in Massachusetts rank as a group? According to a report issued by the federal Corporation for National and Community Service, for the academic year of 2000-01, the Massachusetts state average of 10.7 percent trailed the national average of 12.5 percent. Although the Bay State’s average was well above the mandated minimum, 23 of the 103 Massachusetts institutions included in the study fell below the 7 percent requirement. Among the schools that receive at least $100,000 annually in work-study funds, the lowest percentages were at the College of the Holy Cross (1.0 percent, a miniscule improvement over its 1999-2000 performance), Emerson College (1.7 percent), MIT (2.2 percent), and Roxbury Community College (3.3 percent).

The school with the best record in the state was Berkshire Community College, which spent 46.3 percent of its relatively low work-study allocation ($83,340) on community service. Among schools with more than $100,000 to spend, Simmons College was on top, devoting 34.6 percent of its funds to community service.

Simmons College President Daniel Cheever is not surprised by his school’s high ranking, saying that Simmons considers community service to be an institutional priority. “Our financial aid staff know we are deeply committed,” he says. “Our entire faculty supports it, and I talk about it a lot. It’s a college-wide commitment.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Bill Meinhofer, director of the Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning at the College of the Holy Cross, says there are good reasons for his school’s almost-total failure in recent years to use work-study funds for community service. “Colleges are not in the business to send students out to do community work,” he argues. Without on-campus departments and staff to specifically conduct the business of recruiting community service agencies and transforming work-study students into serve-study students, Meinhofer says, the task of meeting the 7 percent requirement can be daunting. “There is historically no infrastructure to accommodate the placement of students in a serve-study program.”

Still, Holy Cross is making the effort, in part because of the Washington Monthly exposé. Meinhofer estimates that Holy Cross has increased the community service share of its work-study funds to 5 percent during the current academic year, and he predicts that the figure will top 7 percent next year.

Dan Pinch, associate vice president of student financial services at Emerson College, believes that his school’s stingy community service spending reflects a shortage of students who actually earn their entire work-study awards. Many students drop work-study when they have too much school work or find better paying jobs, he says. In order to improve Emerson’s numbers, Pinch says, “We had to hire someone to find community service employment, we advertised serve-study jobs on our Web site, and we increased the wages of serve-study.” Accordingly, Emerson’s share of work-study funds devoted to community service is rising, and Pinch hopes to report 8 percent by 2003.

There is no specific penalty for violating the 7 percent standard, and Jeffrey Andrade, the federal deputy assistant secretary of post-secondary education, doesn’t believe there should be. “We look to see if there’s been a steady change in behavior toward compliance, and not to specifically fine or take away money from students on campus,” says Andrade.

But he also sees a clear distinction between colleges that make the grade on community service, and those that do not. “You have to have a commitment at the top of the institution,” Andrade says. “You have to have community service be a part of your mission in order to do a good job.”

One institution in the local higher-education pantheon that does not, he says, is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “MIT’s track record is abysmal,” says Andrade. “It is unacceptable, and there is no excuse for it.”

MIT’s director of financial aid, Elizabeth Hicks, says the 2000-01 school year, during which the school spent only 2.2 percent of its work-study budget on community service, was an exception. “We had been doing all right until that year, which was an aberration,” says Hicks.

Exactly how much of an aberration is unclear: MIT did even worse in 1999-2000, when its community service spending was a mere 1.9 percent. But MIT is doing better now, spending more than 9 percent of its federal work-study funds on community service in fiscal year 2002. “After developing more jobs in the community, MIT is now exceeding the work-study requirement,” says Hicks.

One local heavyweight that has long met the federal requirement is Harvard University, which reported spending 15.2 percent of its work-study funds on community service during 2000-01. Martha Homer, the university’s director of student employment, says that Harvard has made serve-study part of its mission for 20 years.

“The Federal Work-Study Program has always encouraged the incorporation of community service,” she says. “We just took that encouragement seriously.”