Now that's classy: how Teach for America turned national service into a status symbol.

• Author: Zenilman, Avi

Next month, 1,000 of my closest friends and I will begin our senior year at Columbia. We will then enter a year-long panic about our futures. We'll consider all the usual options. Wannabe lawyers will weigh medium-term futures as law students in Palo Alto or paralegals at Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Anthro and science majors alike will browse the full-page, color ads in the college paper from consulting firms like Bain and investment banks like Lehman Brothers. And then, of course, there's Teach for America.

In "The Organization Kid," a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article about Princeton undergrads, David Brooks admired the work ethic of elite overachievers. But he lamented their lack of purpose beyond finding "new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform." Brooks had a point. As The Washington Monthly reported in 2002 (Joshua Green, "The Other College Rankings"), the nation's best schools do a lousy job when it comes to directing their students towards community or military service. Too often, top students fall into high-status holding patterns--two years on Wall Street that'll fill in time and resume space before applying to grad school. Short of a draft, how do you get the best and the brightest to serve their country?

Wendy Kopp, Teach for America's founder, seems to have figured out the answer. TFA enlists college graduates to spend two years teaching in low-income, low-performing schools for about $40,000 a year. Its stated mission is to "eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation's most promising future leaders in the effort." Like McKinsey in the 1990s, TFA has become a premium destination for elite students. Since 2000, its enrollment has tripled and its applicant pool has more than quadrupled. This year, 2,400 "corps members" will fan out into struggling schools across America. They'll be propelled not just by the program's earnest aims, but because TFA satisfies one of the Organization Kid's most primal needs: prestige. Kopp has harnessed the culture of status-seeking to a greater purpose and turned national service into a resume-builder.

Kopp proposed the program in her 1989 Princeton senior thesis. At the time, according to her 2001 memoir, she was half-heartedly pursuing a job at Morgan Stanley. Her friends were headed to Wall Street because "they just couldn't think of anything else to do." So Kopp, who had managed a $1.5 million student group that organized conferences with corporate leaders...