College Students Taking Credit for Volunteer Work

An op-ed in last Saturday’s New York Times caught my eye and has me thinking deeply. In To Get to Harvard, Go to Haiti?, Frank Bruni discusses “the persistent vogue among secondary-school students for so-called service that’s sometimes about little more than  a faraway adventure and a few lines or paragraphs on their applications to selective colleges.”

Bruni is here discussing the growing trend among American college applicants to claim on their college applications for admission that they have done volunteer work or gone on mission trips to Central America and Africa when in reality all they have done is spent as little as a week — if all that — “helping to repair some village’s crumbling school or library, [only] to return to their comfortable homes and quite possibly write a college-application essay about how transformed they are.”  

Bruni argues that this troubling trend “turns developing-world hardship into a prose-ready opportunity for growth, empathy into an extracurricular activity.” Moreover, Bruni contends that this trend

reflects a broader gaming of the admissions process that concerns [him] just as much, because of its potential to create strange habits and values in the students who go through it, telling them that success is a matter of superficial packaging and checking off the right boxes at the right time.

Like Bruni, I am appalled at this growing trend among students. I am equally appalled at the trend among church-going people who come to me asking for my help in funding their mission trips to Central and South America, Africa and the Caribbean. I question them closely about these trips. Thus far, in answer to my question, “Where will you live during your stay?”, every budding missionary has responded, “In a hotel.” My check book has remained closed to these wonderful missionaries.

Vaughn E. James