Community Service in the Transition: Shifts and Continuities in Participation from High School to College

Abstract

Continuing a decade-long trend, findings from recent annual surveys of first-year college students have documented their participation in community service as high-school seniors at record high levels (Higher Education Research Institute, 1999, 2000, 2001). Eighty-one percent of the 2000 respondents reported volunteering during senior year, although only 24% expected to continue their volunteer work in college. Because other recent data indicate that 64% of undergraduates actually do volunteer (Levine & Cureton, 1998), the college experience may involve students in the community in ways they do not anticipate when they enter. For the majority of students, these findings suggest, involvement in community service may be episodic and contextually driven--not so much a deeply motivated value-oriented choice as an occasional activity that personal circumstances may dictate, encourage, support, or deter. The responses of the first-year students to other survey items appear to support this claim. For example, while volunteering in high school is on the rise among the respondents, trends over the past decade indicate a simultaneous decline in both interest and participation in other forms of voluntary activity, including community action programs, social activism, political participation, and general civic engagement and altruism (HERI, 1999). Political engagement, according to the 2000 Freshman Survey, is at an all-time low, while becoming well-off is the most important of the measured goals (HERI, 2001). Most strikingly, just 59% of first year students reported a personal commitment to helping others in difficulty, the lowest response level in over a decade. Paradoxically, while more students are volunteering than ever before, they are not espousing the civic values that community service is intended to encourage. For some students, involvement in community service could be motivated less by caring than by other factors, such as personal interests, group norms, or the social benefits they derive from participation. This study investigates the phenomenon of shifting patterns of community service participation during the transition between high school and college and, in so doing, seeks to arrive at greater understanding of the dynamics of social participation and involvement among young adults. The transition to college typically brings about change in students' lives as they move into new educational and social environments (Chickering, 1969; Chickering & Reisser, 1993; Upcraft & Gardner, 1990). While some research addresses college student motivation for involvement in community service (Fitch, 1987; Serow, 1991; Waterman, 1997; Winniford, Carpenter, & Grider, 1997), and other research suggests that high-school participation predisposes students to volunteer in college (Astin & Sax, 1998; Astin, Sax, & Avalos, 1999; Berger & Milem, 2002), little empirical evidence exists to characterize the relationship between high school and college participation. Moreover, little is known about the factors that lead students either to drop or sustain their community service after high school or to begin to volunteer in college. This investigation builds on an earlier study of community service participation among high-school students (Marks, 2002). That study employed Selznick's (1992) sociological theory of social participation to account for variation in patterns of students' community involvement. According to Selznick, individuals who involve themselves in the community do so on a segmental or core basis. Segmental participants, who volunteer from time to time, tend to be motivated by personal interests or extrinsic factors, including normative environments. Core participants are more likely to be motivated by values or deeply held beliefs. Applying the theory of social participation to students' participation in community service during the transition between high school and college, we expect to find similar patterns, a point we return to in a subsequent section. …