In an article this month by Joshua Green, the Washington Monthly reported that some of America's most prestigious colleges, including Dartmouth, are not meeting governmental standards in devoting federal work-study funds to community service.
Of the top 20 universities in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, 75 percent trail the national average for performing work-study service. The article said that Dartmouth and Brown were the two worst-performing Ivy League schools.
Federal work-study service has become such a critical issue that in December, Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh introduced legislation requiring schools to devote at least 25 percent of their work-study funding to community service, up from 7 percent today.
Dartmouth fails to meet this minimum requirement, with only 6.1 percent of our federal work-study funds being used for community service.
"I think we have to be more aggressive in placing students in the community," Stuart Lord, Dean of the Tucker Foundation, said. "I just think that we have not combined our resources together in a focused way to meet the minimum."
Why do elite schools have a difficult time meeting the work-study minimum? The Washington Monthly article explains that "Schools that value service don't have much trouble finding students to perform it ... the hyper-competitiveness that has arisen in elite schools in recent decades has pushed aside 'soft' concerns, such as community service."
But statistics indicate that many Dartmouth students are "soft" -- over 1,000 each year participate in Dartmouth Community Services, so several Dartmouth officials found Green's explanation inadequate.
Donna Desjardins, former director of the Student Employment Office, said, "Dartmouth College has enjoyed a long and rich tradition of community service that far exceeds any government standards of any kind.
"There are acts of community service that happen all over the campus, the community and the country that Dartmouth students are a part of," Desjardins continued. "These are not tabulated in [Green's] results."
"With all the students doing service here, there is definitely a desire at Dartmouth to be involved," Lord said. "I just think most Dartmouth students don't know they can do this ... do their community service for work study."
"We have to be very forthright in promoting this program," Lord said. "We should not be embarrassed or ashamed, but we should accept this as an opportunity."
Lord mentioned that the Tucker foundation has set a goal to get 90 percent of all Dartmouth students involved in community service over the next four years.
"There are a lot of students who have to make a living," Lord admitted, "but here is another option for students to work in places they can be passionate about."
Interestingly, Green's article points out that work-study students in service areas are often more committed to projects than volunteers. "I know a work-study kid is going to commit for a full semester," Karen Baker, a coordinator for the DC Reads program for child literacy, told the Washington Monthly.
The Federal Work-Study Program was initiated under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to "encourage students receiving Federal student financial aid to participate in community service activities that will benefit the nation and engender in the student a sense of social responsibility."
"Work-study had an implicit, if not an explicit, purpose of urging students to do community service," Lois Dickinson, an education scholar at the Brookings Institute, told the Washington Monthly.
In the late 1960s, when students became much more politically involved, campus administrators began to veer away from service-oriented work-study activities for fear of creating conflict on campus.
Instead, schools began to use students overwhelmingly for campus jobs, such as in cafeterias and libraries.
A recent trend, however, has brought service work back to the forefront of any kind of federal financial aid.
In 1997, Bill Clinton and Colin Powell organized a national summit on service in Philadelphia. One year later, Clinton sought to vastly increase the work-study program and added $300 million to it. Most colleges and universities balked, though, when Clinton proposed that 50 percent of work-study aid should be linked to community service, and Clinton conceded.
Last year, 174 schools nationwide failed to meet the minimum 7 percent of work-study service.
"I hope this article tells us we have to do more and bring the community together," Lord said.