A friend who is deep into the college admissions odyssey with her high school junior was available recently for a long overdue lunch. As a mother of two rising 10^th graders who is clinging to the peaceful moments when the decision over whether to opt for the SAT or the ACT isn’t haunting my dreams, I would be crazy not to start taking notes from the battle-hardened moms I know. After all, many of them could run large corporations if they weren’t spending all their time navigating applications. So, I asked my friend for her best piece of advice.

She told me to get my kids started with some kind of volunteer project — now. “You have to make it part of your child’s ‘story’ somehow,” she said. “Schools want to see it.” She laughed as she spoke, recognizing that she sounded mercenary. In fairness, though, getting into college has become something of a combat sport. She left me with the name of a local middle school looking for volunteer math tutors. “Your kids can do it online for an hour a week and don’t even have to leave their desks,” she said. Convenience is key when pitching in, of course. I didn’t even bother to say that neither of my kids actually wants to be a tutor. That would have been beside the point.

Universities in this country have made a mess of a lot of our traditionally treasured values. Everything from the classic humanities education to due process on campus has been willfully wrecked. Now they have ruined the spirit of volunteerism as well.  

They have turned it into an engineered, self-serving PR plan, rather than an authentic expression of concern for others. It doesn’t matter that most 15-year-olds are not qualified yet to “save the world” or that not all kids have eight free hours a week to raise money for installing solar panels in South American villages. Virtuous activity must be logged, and 501(c)(3)s must be formed, even by those too young to sign the incorporation papers. Never mind that most ninth-graders know little about environmental science. The Ivy League loves a teenager who starts a climate change club at school, no matter how banal it is.

Yet if young people are taught to give so they can get (into college), one has to wonder if they will continue to give once they have gotten (in). According to a University of Maryland School of Public Policy report, “college students volunteer less frequently than high school students.” The March 2018 report indicates that while 25 percent of students ages 16-19 engage in volunteer work, that number dips to 17 percent among those ages 20-24. The volunteer rate for adults over 25 drops again and peaks only between ages 35-44 and over 75, when life-stage factors affect the numbers. 

It is hard to argue that universities are inspiring long term, consistent habits of service amongst its applicant pool by not-so-subtly suggesting teens spend their Sundays at soup kitchens. A proportion of them suspiciously seem to be dropping their “commitment” to service at just about the same time they check into their dorm rooms.

No one would argue that emphasizing service is a bad thing, but there are bad ways to do good things. Feeding hungry people to get your ED acceptance letter is still feeding hungry people, but it doesn’t give you a good reason to keep doing it when you are 30. Most of all, teaching kids to treat service like a strategic self-advancement proposition just has “ick” written all over it.

What of the kids who visited their 90-year-old neighbor every Tuesday afternoon but didn’t post to Instagram because they didn’t want to degrade the experience by marketing it? They weren’t playing along. If the local paper didn’t cover it, would their resumes have made it to the top of the pile? Are we overlooking actual altruism and human kindness because it isn’t “official” or connected to a sanctioned social justice cause? 

A skeptic might wonder if “social justice” is really the point of it all. If service really mattered to elite schools, they would make it a requirement for their tenured professors, and embrace ROTC on campus. They might even favor the application of the student who helped to organize the anti-abortion march in her hometown, but I suspect most don’t. The volunteerism profiles high school students are being incentivized to create seem to align nicely with the social justice ideology academia adores.

Ultimately, by definition, volunteering should be a voluntary act. Everyone wants to see more of it, but that goal is probably best achieved, and sustained, when service is modeled rather than mandated. Perhaps volunteerism can be about virtue rather than virtue signaling, and we can let just this one thing stay sacred.