More than 500 Colleges Apply for President’s Honor Roll

Washington, DC – More than 500 colleges and universities have applied for Presidential recognition that honors schools providing extraordinary volunteer service to their communities and to hurricane victims in the Gulf region, David Eisner, Chief Executive Officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, said today.

A total of 510 colleges and universities submitted applications describing how they and their students have donated their time and resources to improve lives in their communities and in the Gulf States. For their efforts, six of those institutions will receive the first-ever President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll award October 17 at the Campus Compact 20th Anniversary in Chicago. In addition, 141 colleges and universities will receive recognition for distinguished community service.

“The extraordinary response to the President’s Honor Roll is another sign that universities are embracing their civic mission in new and creative ways,” Mr. Eisner said. “More and more we see colleges working to improve their communities and encouraging an ethic of service by their students. These efforts are fueling a growing movement of college student service that will benefit our nation for many years to come.”

In conjunction with the President’s Honor Roll, the Corporation will release a comprehensive national study about trends in college student volunteering using data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau since 2002. The study will give a detailed breakdown of college student volunteering habits and patterns, and will include a first-ever ranking of college student volunteering rates by state.

The Honor Roll itself provides new evidence of a strong level of civic engagement among today's college students. More than 1.1 million students from Honor Roll schools participated in local community service activities, and more than 219,000 students provided hurricane relief.

The President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll is co-sponsored by the Corporation, the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, USA Freedom Corps, and the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. The recognition is presented in cooperation with Campus Compact, a national coalition of nearly 1,000 college and university presidents, and supported by all the major national higher education associations. Monetary awards, courtesy of the Case Foundation, will presented to the six top schools to support further service on their campuses.

Over the past several years, colleges around the country have been reporting steady increases in community service participation. According to UCLA’s annual survey of 260,000 college freshmen, two out of three students entering college in 2005 said it is essential or very important to help others who are in difficulty, the highest this figure has been in the past 25 years. Observers have attributed this growth in student service to several causes: the proliferation of high-school and college service-learning classes; an increase in the number of campus offices that link students to volunteer opportunities, and the lingering impact of the September 11 and Hurricane Katrina catastrophes.

The Corporation for National and Community Service is working with other federal agencies, higher education and student associations, and nonprofit organizations to encourage even greater levels of service and civic engagement by college students. Their goal is to increase the number of college student participating in volunteer service to 5 million college students annually by 2010.

The President’s Higher Education Community Honor Roll is part of this larger college service initiative. Institutions of higher education providing exceptional national and community service were encouraged to apply for the recognition – and the response exceeded expectations for this first-time award. Private and public schools included four-year institutions, professional schools, and community colleges, and they chronicled a broad variety of service programs and activities that have strengthened neighborhoods around them and in the hurricane-devastated Gulf region.

Community service programs and activities included mentorship programs for foster children, literacy tutoring for preschool children in underserved communities, homebuilding through Habitat for Humanity, and neighborhood cleanup programs. Universities reported that college students provided nearly 2.3 million service hours volunteering in Hurricane Katrina relief. As one example, tens of thousands of college students substituted work for fun during their winter and spring breaks by traveling to the Gulf to gut homes, clear debris, repair roofs, and paint buildings. The value of services provided was approximately $87 million.

College student community service and civic engagement are key elements of the new five-year strategic plan of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Each year, the Corporation makes a significant investment in building a culture of service on college campuses through Learn and Serve America and AmeriCorps programs at institutions of higher education. In addition to direct grants to support service-learning and engagement of students in their communities, the Corporation has also supported higher education through the more than $1.2 billion in Segal AmeriCorps Education Awards to AmeriCorps members who complete their service and use their awards to pay for college tuition or to pay back student loans.

The Corporation for National and Community Service improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through service and volunteering. Each year, the Corporation provides opportunities for more than 2 million Americans of all ages and backgrounds to serve their communities and country through Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America. For more information, go to http://www.nationalservice.gov.

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