Involvement in Learning revisited: Lessons we have learned

Journal of College Student Development, Sep/Oct 1999 by Astin, Alexander W

We have also been looking at factors that enhance the institution's degree of commitment to facilitate student involvement in community service. Two of the strongest factors are the priorities given to student development and to developing a sense of community among students and faculty. We also tend to find a strong emphasis on promoting student involvement in community service at institutions where the faculty themselves are committed to such things as influencing social values, helping others in difficulty, developing a meaningful philosophy of life, and promoting racial understanding.

The weakest commitment to promoting student involvement in community service tends to be found at institutions where there is a strong faculty research orientation and a high priority given to resource acquisition and reputational enhancement. A weak commitment to promoting involvement in community service is also associated with a lack of interest in students among administrators, a curriculum that is seen as suffering from overspecialization, and a lack of trust between minority students and administrators.

Given these patterns of positive and negative correlates, it is not surprising that there are differences by type of institution in the priorities assigned to facilitating student involvement in volunteer service. A particularly distressing finding is that both public 4-year colleges and especially public universities show a weak commitment to student involvement in community service, whereas the private 4-year colleges assign a much higher priority to involving students in community service. The private universities have an average level of commitment. These findings are ironic, if not troubling: Why do institutions that are presumably created to serve the public give such a low priority to public service?

Could the low level of commitment found in public institutions be attributable to their larger size? We conducted a series of analyses that showed, first, that size is indeed a negative factor in institutional commitment. But even after controlling for size, we still find a lower level of commitment in the public institutions.

More recently my colleague Linda Sax and I have been using a new 9-year follow-up of the What Matters in College? sample to examine the effects of volunteer service on postcollege development. While the analyses are still in progress, we have already determined that participating in volunteer service during the undergraduate years has positive effects on such postcollege outcomes as enrolling in graduate school, being committed to promoting racial understanding, and socializing across racial ethnic lines. It even increases the likelihood that the student will donate money to the college.

Diversity and Multiculturalism

We have been able to focus on three types of environmental measures relating to issues of diversity or multiculturalism: (a) institutional diversity emphasis, (b) faculty diversity emphasis, and (c) five specific student diversity experiences: