The other college rankings ...: when it comes to national service, America's "best colleges" are its worst.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: Includes table: Percentage of Federal Work-Study Funds Used for Community Service - Statistical Data Included

Chances are that if you attended college in the last 35 years and didn't come from a wealthy family, you received financial aid that included a work-study job. And chances are that the job you held entailed washing dishes in the cafeteria, opening mail in the registrar's office, or signing out basketballs at the school gym. Though you may not have been aware of it, 75 percent of your wages came from Uncle Sam, through the Federal Work-Study Program, created to help students pay their way through college. Today, the program is bigger than ever, providing jobs to almost one million students through more than $1 billion in financial aid.

But for a small number of students, work-study means more than just providing grunt labor for their college or university. It involves serving their community by tutoring, mentoring, or building homes for low-income families. Suzanne Mastrogiovanni, a senior at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, teaches 7-year-olds in a local school how to read. Upon completing a three-hour training course and passing a police background check, she abandoned her previous work-study job of cleaning equipment in the athletic center. "That was kind of a grub job," she says. "But working with kids every day is a new adventure." About 40 percent of Nova Southeastern's students work in community service to fulfill their financial aid requirement, one of the highest rates in the country.

Students like Mastrogiovanni and universities like Nova Southeastern were exactly what Congress had in mind when it established the program in 1965. But over the years that spirit of service has withered--today it's the exception rather than the rule. Though students themselves are often eager to serve, the most recent Department of Education figures show that the average college devotes less than 12 percent of its work-study funds to community service.

Given the renewed public interest in national service since September 11, it's worth examining what has happened to one of the first federal programs created to encourage it. Which schools are leading the way? Which ones are slacking? To find out, The Washington Monthly teamed up with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism to take a close look at the data--reported annually by schools themselves--and to interview dozens of college presidents, students, financial aid officers, lobbyists, and nonprofit directors. The results can be found in the accompanying tables. Think of them as college rankings that measure what the other guys don't--schools' commitment to community service, the Peace Corps, and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC).

What the numbers show is that when it comes to community service, the nation's best schools perform the worst. Of the top 20 liberal arts schools in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, 70 percent fall below the national average for performing work-study service--also known as "serve-study" (see page 15). The top 20 universities do even worse; 75 percent trail the average (see page 14). In fact, of the 20 colleges and universities that devote the greatest percentage of their federal aid to community service, only Stanford University ranks among the U.S. News top 20. Elite schools did somewhat better in another measure of service, graduates who joined the Peace Corps (see page 16). But for military service like ROTC, America's best colleges and universities are AWOL (see page 17). "We can safely say," concludes Barry Checkoway, a professor of social work and urban planning at the University of Michigan, "that most of the nation's prestigious universities have abandoned their civic mission."

The poor service records in higher education, especially by the best schools, have drawn the attention of lawmakers. In December, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) introduced legislation requiring schools to devote at least 25 percent of their work-study funding to community service, up from 7 percent today. Such a move could transform the one million work-study students into the nation's largest community-service organization, dwarfing even the 50,000 participants in Americorps.

It would be a boon to the nation's needy. The America Reads program employs about 29,000 work-study students to tutor tens of thousands of elementary school kids, making measurable improvement in reading skills. College students themselves benefit, too. A recent UCLA study of 22,000 college students found that performing community service boosted everything from grade-point average and writing skills to self-esteem and racial understanding.

But before Congress expands serve-study, it should take a hard look at how the program is being run--which is not very well. It is rarely monitored and entirely unenforced, with many schools gaming numbers to meet requirements or simply ignoring them altogether.

Government-Subsidized Caddies

The Federal Work-Study Program was initiated under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and moved to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare as part of the Higher Education Act of 1965. "Work-study," says Lois Dickson Rice, an education scholar at the Brookings Institute, "had an implicit, if not an explicit, purpose of urging students to do community service." Indeed, look up today's law and its purpose seems clear: "[T]o encourage students receiving Federal student financial aid to participate in community service activities that will benefit the nation and engender in the students a sense of social responsibility and commitment to the community." For a while, that's what it did. But in the late 1960s, as students became increasingly radicalized by the anti-war movement, schools retreated from community service which, loosely defined, could include the sorts of activities that alarm university administrators--in the late '60s thousands of work-study students organized under the progressive New York City Mayor John Lindsay. In the 1970s colleges saw their costs soar during the energy crisis; state schools in particular were left to operate with much smaller budgets. To compensate, more and more schools limited work-study jobs to campus, where students--a cheap source of labor--began working in academic departments, libraries, dining halls, and rec centers. The ideal of community service all but disappeared. Many schools, particularly expensive elite universities, didn't seem to mind.

A decade later, centrist Democrats revived the idea of tying service to work-study when, in 1989, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) proposed that all such jobs involve community service. His bill didn't get far. But three years later, Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.) introduced a measure which halved that requirement. House Republicans weakened it to just 5 percent (it rose to 7 percent last year), before passing what became...