community service for the lay-millennial

THE TL;DR: using social entrepreneurship effectively increases service among college students.

The Problem

In the fall of my sophomore year, I received the opportunity to act as a student consultant on Carnegie Mellon University's ten year strategic plan. As the only student in the room, all heads turned when I was asked, "Why aren't our students doing community service?" While I hesitated to answer, I knew my peers noticeably reduced their time spent in soup kitchens and homeless shelters after joining undergrad, partially for a new set of academic demands, but partially because new, non-volunteer based organizations dominated their extra time. So few students engaged in direct service opportunities that I regularly advised my residents to engage, only to be told that they did not have the time.  

Millennials have been called everything, from the "me me me" generation, to lazy and entitled, to selfless. Of course, as a millennial, this caused a great amount of cognitive dissonance within me; the individuals I work with are nothing short of altruistic, but are often consumed by their drive to land a well-paying job to ease student debt. What was causing the lack of volunteering culture once students reached college campuses? 

Digging In

Behavioral economic studies show that monetizing altruistic intentions actually lead to a reduction of effort and incentive to perform them, summarized neatly in this chapter of Dr. Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It's written that monetizing socially good behaviors often lead to a "crowding out" effect of societally optimal behavior for the sake of normative activity. After reading this book a few years prior, I began thinking of it in the context of the students who apply to top tier institutions.

Increased competitiveness of acceptance into a strong school compel many young adults to maximize the ideal characteristics of a strong college applicant: strong grades, high standardized test scores, several leadership skills, and high volunteer hours. Originally, these metrics may have offered a holistic perspective on the lifestyle of an applicant, but more likely in recent years, these metrics provide goals for individual students to strive towards. The process of college applications transformed traditionally altruistic behavior into a cost-benefit approach: if I volunteer here, what schools can I get into?

If this is the case, and there is an explicit reward provided to young adults for direct service, then there is no clear incentive to continue this behavior after joining an undergraduate institution. So maybe this was the reason students were not participating in service after joining college--they didn't have to anymore. What could I do on campus to make service an act of altruism again?

What to Do?

Obviously, a single young woman cannot change the style of the entire college admittance process. But luckily, right around this time, I was an Resident Assistant watching the community service opportunities in housing communities remain underutilized. The opportunities were not inherently demanding; they would be an hour to five hours a month, and the excuse that freshmen (and I, as a freshman) used that they were too busy made little sense in this context.

What were students doing instead? They were engaging with challenging leadership and research opportunities on campus; opportunities that were mentally stimulating and attractive projects to put on a resume in the midst of a job search. Now that students no longer needed community service, their priorities changed to ensure their future success, even if they preferred more time to participate in altruistic opportunities. It quickly became clear that students wanted opportunities to engage with the greater community and world using their skills and minds, not just their physical labor (though equally as important). 

College students hungered for social entrepreneurship.

The Social Entrepreneurship Team

Of course, due to my stubborn adherence to repeating my ideas until I'm allowed to do them, a fellow Resident Assistant joined forces with me to begin an experiment. We asked RAs to choose just two to three people from their floor communities of thirty who were interested in engaging in problem solving. The only condition we put on their work was that they would need to serve the community they currently lived in, Pittsburgh. In the end, we brought in around 15 students, who sectioned off to work on three different projects: increasing funding for public education in Pittsburgh, increasing access to computer science education, and providing project work that incentivized students to pursue higher education.

As time went on through spring semester, some projects reduced scope, with students raising money through campus activities to provide funding for small items at local high schools, and some projects increased scope. The project on project work became a full fledged campus organization, which you can read about here. It became so big that it made the front page of the website at CMU, which was really cool. They've done amazing work since, which you can see on their website.

Reflections from the Program

Afterwards, we asked our students to write up some reflections on their work in the program, and some really cool stuff came out of it. Here's just a few excerpts;

I think Social Entrepreneurship is a great idea for students to serve the community in a way they’re really passionate about. I love giving back to the community, but sometimes I just can’t do it because I’m not interested in that particular service. Being able to combine both service and interests is something that should be implemented more in the future, especially because we, as Carnegie Mellon students, have access to really cool resources that can be used to make a powerful difference in peoples’ lives.

And from another student:

I’ve got to admit that if not for having a program like this one, I would definitely not be as involved in service as I am, and I likely wouldn’t be involved at all. Personally, this program was much more engaging to me than typical service outings where you put in your time working at an organization to directly help someone out.With that kind of service work, I always end up feeling that while the work is valuable, it only lasts as long as I’m there helping out. With this program, even though our project didn’t get finished this semester, I always felt like the time was being invested into something that could create a more lasting impact in an area that I really care about.

In the end, there were a lot of logistical things that served to be fixed--what was the estimated scope of the program? How could we have better directed students to personnel who would be more helpful experts than ourselves? And how can we cultivate relationships with the community we wish to serve?

But it was also very powerful. Students became involved with the Pittsburgh community who never planned to do service in college. Something was working, and hopefully, someone else might be able to come along and make this project an ongoing reality. Even if it was only a few more people, we were able to change perspectives to make students want to make Pittsburgh a better place.