The Great Servers: For applicants, 'community service' is de rigueur — and often baloney

National Review, Oct 13, 2003 by Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky

'So," I asked, "what are you doing this summer?"

"I'm setting up a nonprofit to help at-risk youth attend college."

"That's great," I replied. "How are you going to fund it?"

Pause. "That's kind of the problem. I don't really know how to get any money for it."

I was speaking with a certified "young leader" of the sort one meets at student leadership conferences. He knew very well that it would be extremely difficult to get a new nonprofit started, and that he could accomplish much more at a preexisting charity. But he went ahead anyway.

This kind of conversation is very common among undergraduates and college-bound high-school seniors. Set against calls from prominent figures on both left and right to make "community service" a nationwide requirement for graduation from high school, stories like this should give us pause.

It is one thing for society to appreciate community service, but quite another to require it. Where it is already in place, mandatory service often contributes to a culture of hypocrisy. It can undermine young people's respect for and interest in genuine volunteerism. To understand this darker side of student volunteerism one need look no further than the admissions office at any major university.

Students get into top colleges through hard work and by learning the tacit rules of the admissions game. Genius is rarely the secret of entry. Admissions officers demand not only perfect grades but also prodigious extracurricular or athletic achievements, and community service. Insiders like to call this mix "the triple S," for "scholarship, sports, and service." In other words, if you haven't done enough hours collecting dimes to save the whales from hungry Icelanders, then you had best play the cello like Yo-Yo Ma, and be a mean lineman to boot.

It's good for the best and brightest to feel a call to serve the community. But from this student's perspective, making service into a virtual entry requirement is a moral trap: What universities look for as a sign of selflessness, students undertake as a way to get into college and get their careers started. Benefit to the community can become merely incidental. This corrosive paradox makes many students cynical about community service. Says one classmate of mine: "I stopped doing community service after my high school forced me into it. It wasn't generous. I did it for me, not for anyone else." Many more would probably admit the same sentiments, at least after a few beers.

Just how self-serving can college-bound community service get? Consider this headline from www.StudentNow.com, a website that offers advice to prospective scholars: "Be a Triple Threat: Combine Academics, Activities and Community Service." Community service "used to be a big plus" advises www.CollegeConfidential.com. "Now, however, it's almost the norm, especially at the more competitive colleges." This advice reflects a confusion on the part of college admissions offices: In their zeal to recruit Samaritans, colleges have attracted a great number of Pharisees.

For many, these pressures continue on to higher levels of the admissions and resume sweepstakes. Students interested in graduate schools, professional schools, and prestigious fellowships and scholarships are also advised to document their do-gooding. Sometimes the distortion of priorities diminishes the benefit to those one purports to help, as can be seen in the conversation at the start of this article.

The fact is that, with a few laudable exceptions, most of the volunteer work performed by college students is too small-scale and fragmentary to improve the world much. One Princeton student's experiences building a school on a summer service trip to Ghana illustrate this well. "Before I went to Ghana, I didn't realize how ineffective it would be. The school hasn't bettered their lives," he says. "I'm a lot less interested in micro-volunteering." Many students who volunteer in American inner cities report similar feelings.

What's more, colleges place a premium on leadership as well as service. This means that applicants tend to fare better when they start their own charitable projects, rather than join preexisting ones. Often, the limited time and resources available to high-school students translate into less valuable achievements but better-sounding resume items. For example, one might found an organization to collect prom dresses for the homeless rather than work at a soup kitchen run by a local church.

Outright fakery comes a few steps beyond distorted motivations. In a recent case, a Harvard-bound New Jersey kid -- who made national news by taking her school to court to be made sole valedictorian -- was caught plagiarizing columns she wrote for a local newspaper. Moreover, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, her father aided her extensive community-service projects, delivering food to food banks and otherwise doing much of the work. The girl, who was also admitted to Princeton, Duke, Stanford, and Cornell, ultimately had her admission to Harvard revoked because of the plagiarism.