About 74 percent of undergraduate students at The University of Texas at Austin provided nearly three million hours of volunteer service helping in community and university projects during the 2001-2002 academic year, according to a privately funded study by the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service and the university's Office of Survey Research.
The survey, released April 28 in conjunction with National Volunteer Week, April 27-May 3, shows these students performed volunteer service that totaled 2,997,000 hours for the academic year. The volunteer work included 45 percent serving in the community, 25 percent in university and community functions, and four percent solely in university functions. Students who volunteered were most likely to have done so because they felt compassion towards people in need or because they wanted to gain a new perspective.
The student volunteer work included 29 percent for education-related activities, 23 percent for religious organizations, 17 percent for professional groups and organizations, 17 percent for youth development/mentoring programs and 16 percent student government and related work.
Women accounted for 55 percent of the volunteers and men for 45 percent. Seventy-seven percent of African American and Hispanic students volunteered, followed by 74 percent of Anglos, 73 percent of Asian Americans and 65 percent of international students.
Volunteers spent a mean of 111 hours volunteering during the academic year. Undergraduate men served an average of 76 hours and women an average of 89 hours. Hispanic students reported 100 hours of service, Asian American students 85 hours, Anglo students contributed 81 hours, African American students volunteered 67 hours and international students served 47 hours.
Students who reported membership in Greek sororities and fraternities, as well as other organizations, served the most, reporting an average of 144 hours of service. Students who reported membership in non-Greek groups volunteered 92 hours, while students with no membership affiliation volunteered 60 hours.
"It is very encouraging to see so many students from The University of Texas at Austin engaged in volunteering to help others," said Curtis Meadows, director of the RGK Center. "It bodes well for our state and nation that while seeking an education for future leadership, they are also preparing to shape and support more caring and civil societies, here and around the world."
Volunteerism at The University of Texas at Austin appears to be considerably higher than the nationwide percentage reflected by a December 2002 report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. It noted that 27.6 percent of the nation's civilian non-institutional population age 16 years and over volunteered through or for organizations at some point during the period from September 2001 to September 2002. The volunteers in the survey spent a median of 52 hours volunteering during the year.
The Independent Sector, a non-profit, non-partisan coalition of more than 700 national organizations representing tens of thousands of charitable groups, conducted a survey showing that 44 percent of the nation's population 18 years of age and older was involved in volunteer service during the year 2000.
Data for the report on volunteerism at The University of Texas at Austin resulted from a survey of 1,514 undergraduate students completed in spring 2002. The sample was composed of students who were enrolled in spring 2002 and who had phone numbers on record with the university. The demographic characteristics of the sample closely match those of the student population from which it was drawn. For example, 53 percent of the sample is female compared to 51 percent of undergraduate students enrolled in spring 2002. In terms of race, the sample matches the undergraduate population enrolled during that period. About four percent of the student population and sample were African American, 16 percent of both were Asian American, 14 percent of the student population and 13 percent of the sample were Hispanic, four percent of both the sample and population were international and 62 percent of the population versus 63 percent of the sample were Anglo.
The Independent Sector, a national coalition of more than 700 organizations, foundations and corporate philanthropy programs that collectively represent the nonprofit sector, calculates the value of volunteer time and updates the value annually. The dollar value figure is based on the average hourly earnings of nonagricultural workers as determined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is then increased by 12 percent to estimate for fringe benefits. At the 2001 value of $16.05 per hour, the estimated dollar value of the volunteer service provided by undergraduate students from The University of Texas at Austin is $48,101,850.
The study shows that many of the students who volunteer in college also had provided volunteer service while in high school, often with other members of their family.
African American students participated in the greatest variety of volunteer activities (slightly more than two affiliations), followed by Hispanic, Asian American, Anglo and international students. While much of the volunteering activity took place off campus, a significant amount of that activity was organized by on-campus student organizations. Students of the colleges of Education and Fine Arts and unidentified academic majors served in at least two organizations. Topping the list with three affiliations are students who were members of both Greek and other student organizations.
Seventy-six percent of freshmen, 74 percent of sophomores and juniors, and 73 percent of seniors reported serving. The College of Education reported the largest percentage of students engaged in service at 82 percent, followed by Business majors (76 percent), Liberal Arts (76 percent), Fine Arts (76 percent) and "other," which includes schools such as Pharmacy, Nursing and Social Work, with 76 percent of these students volunteering.
The study shows that students were generous with their resources as well as their time. Sixty percent of students gave money; 21 percent gave only to non-Sept. 11-related causes, 19 percent gave only to Sept. 11-related causes and 20 percent gave to both types of causes. Of the students who contributed money, 65 percent reported giving less than $50 to all causes, while 35 percent contributed more than $50. Churches and religious organizations received 12 percent of the student donations and health organizations received 10 percent of the contributions.
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University of Texas at Austin Contacts
Dr. Sarah Jane Rehnborg - Professor of Volunteerism and Consultant to the RGK Center for Philanthropy & Community Service at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, UT student volunteerism survey project lead and expert on volunteer program management and volunteer employment in the public sector, bio available online. Contact: Rehnborg@mail.utexas.edu, 512-475-7616
Dr. Marc Musick - Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, UT student volunteerism survey data analysis lead and expert on medical sociology, religion and health, sociology of aging and the life course and social psychology, bio and further contact information available online. E-mail: musick@prc.utexas.edu
Glen Baumgart - Director of the UT Volunteer and Service Learning Center, Resource for information on UT student volunteer experience and provided input on survey design, contact at 512-471-6161; e-mail: gbaumgart@mail.utexas.edu
Summary of Other Data and Findings Pertaining to Collegiate Volunteerism
CampusCares "Census of Service":: This is an online database that contains detailed information on community service and civic engagement activities at the hundreds of colleges and universities that have completed the CampusCares on-line survey. It also provides summary statistics on the institutions represented. Visitors can retrieve records by the specific type of program; by state; and by public or private, two-year or four-year and by institution name.
Surveys from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA: HERI, an interdisciplinary center for research, evaluation, information, policy studies, and research training in postsecondary education, administers several national surveys that include some data on community service by undergraduates. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey is a national longitudinal study of the American higher education system. Established in 1966 at the American Council on Education, the CIRP is now administered by the Higher Education Research Institute under the direction of Dr. Linda Sax. The CIRP is the nation's largest and oldest empirical study of higher education, involving data on some 1,800 institutions and over 11 million students. It is regarded as the most comprehensive source of information on college students. The annual report of the CIRP Freshman Survey provides normative data on each year's entering college students. The College Student Survey (CSS) helps institutions respond to the needs of assessment and accountability by providing information on a broad range of student outcomes. In addition, the CSS can be used with the CIRP Freshman Survey to study student growth and change. To date, close to 800 institutions and 270,000 students have participated in the CSS. The Your First College Year (YFCY) Survey, in its fourth year of national administration, is a national survey designed in collaboration with the Policy Center on the First Year of College. It assesses the academic and personal development of students over the first year of college to assist institutions in first-year programs and retention strategies.
National Survey of Student Engagement: In its fourth year, this is a nationwide survey of nearly 300,000 college students assessing the quality of their undergraduate educational experience. It is administered to randomly selected first-year and senior students at 437 colleges and universities by the Center for Survey Research at Indiana University. The College Student Report 2003, the survey instrument, takes less than 15 minutes to complete via either a paper or web version, and questions pertain to how and where students spend their time, the nature and quality of their interactions with faculty members and peers, and what they have gained from their classes and other aspects of their college experience. Co-sponsors of the NSSE project include The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning and the Lumina Foundation for Education.
The Institute Survey of Student Attitudes: A national survey of college undergraduates conducted by The Institute of Politics at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, founded to inspire undergraduate students to enter careers in politics and public service, and to promote greater understanding and cooperation between the academic community and the political world. The Institute surveys undergraduate attitudes on politics on an annual basis.
Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey: The Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement in America at Harvard leads a partnership of some three-dozen community foundations that have committed themselves to a long-term campaign to rebuild levels of connectedness in their communities. They will take the lead in catalyzing community action and in funding innovative approaches to increasing the stock of social capital. As the first step of this campaign, they have undertaken a massive scale survey to conduct "community physicals" using the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. The survey maps the relative strengths and areas for improvement in their communities' civic behavior and sets a baseline against which future progress can be assessed in another survey several years hence. The effort builds on the work of Prof. Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: Collapse and Revival of the American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), that details how markedly our civic ties have weakened over the last generation.
Campus Compact Survey: The Public Opinion Laboratory of the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Public Policy at Brown University conducted a survey regarding the involvement and the activities of the students and faculty in the Campus Compact member schools. Campus Compact is a network of 880 public and private, two year and four year colleges and universities located through out the United States and abroad, dedicated to promoting community service that develops students' citizenship skills and values, as well as encouraging partnerships between campuses and communities. The Campus Compact network includes 30 state-based Campus Compacts (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin), and the Campus Compact National Center for Community Colleges based at Mesa Community College in Arizona. The Texas Compact is located at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Forty-two two and four year institutions of higher education in Texas are members of the Compact. The University of Texas at Austin is not a member of the Compact.
Independent Sector : A diverse coalition of charitable, educational, religious, health and social welfare organizations, the Independent sector champions issues affecting the nonprofit sector. The organization sponsors a wide range of studies, encourages active citizen participation and sponsors national leadership forums. In addition to the Youth in Lifelong Service Report, the organization studied teen volunteerism in 1995. The Independent Sector works with the Department of Labor to affix a annual dollar value to volunteer service based on an imputed wage structure.
Highlights from Various Surveys
CampusCares
Estimated number of college students who volunteered in 1999-2000: 5,351,984
Estimated total service hours given: 1,166,889,241
Estimated total value of student volunteer time: $ 17,637,530,881
Most popular service areas among students: Working with kids as tutor/mentor, Working with kids as a coach/scouting, Service to the church
Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey
54 percent of adults with a college education work on a community service project in the past 12 months, as compared to 41 percent with some college and 25 percent with high school degree or less
The mean number of times adults with a college education volunteers is 13 as compared to 9 times for adults with some college and 8 times for adults with a high school degree or less
44 percent of adults with a college education participate in a charity or social welfare organization, as compared to 34 percent of adults with some college and 22 percent of adults with a high school degree or less
National Survey of Student Engagement 2002
Almost two thirds of seniors (63%) did community service or volunteer work during college.
Students who belong to Greek organizations were more likely than their non-member peers to perform a service activity.
Transfer and older students were less likely to engage in community service than their non-transfer or traditional-age peers.
Students who live on or near campus are more engaged in volunteer work than their peers who drive to campus.
Campus Compact
Of the 730 members surveyed, (327 responded for a return rate of 45 percent) 28% of students are involved in service.
Two-thirds of the students participating in community service projects are female.
78 percent are Caucasian, while 11 percent are African-American, 6 percent are Hispanic, 6 percent are Asian American, 4 percent are native American and 11 are something else.
2000 CIRP+CSS (Cooperative Institutional Research Program Freshman Survey and College Student Survey aggregate data) Institutional Summary
Of the students surveyed from the participating 4 year institutions:Twelve percent participated in student government.
Fifteen percent participated in an ethnic/racial student organization.
Thirty-two percent tutored another student.
Eighty-five percent reported performing volunteer work over the course of their freshman year, and 75 percent reported performing volunteer work in 2000.
Furthermore 42 percent reported performing community/volunteer service as part of a class, 52 percent as part of a collegiate sponsored activity, and 43 percent independently through a non-collegiate group. Fifteen percent plan to perform volunteer work six months from the date of the survey.
Your First College Year
The percent of freshman reporting that they perform volunteer work "frequently" or "occasionally" dropped from 89 percent at college entry to 63 percent at the end of the first college year, a decrease of 26 percentage points.
Independent Sector: Engaging Youth in Lifelong Service
A telephone survey of more that 4,000 adults traced the influence of youth service on self-reported adult volunteer behavior. Key findings include:Forty-four percent of adults volunteer and two-thirds of these volunteers began volunteering their time when they were young.
Adults who began volunteering as youth are twice as likely to volunteer as those who did not volunteer when they were younger.
High school volunteering recently reached the highest levels in the past 50 years.
In every income and age group, those who volunteered as youth give and volunteer more than those who did not.
Those who volunteered as youth and whose parents volunteered became the most generous adults in giving time.
Other
Students at Texas A&M donated approximately 98,994 hours of community service during 2001-2002 (CampusCare Census of Service)
In 1999, Hispanic students in grades 6 to 12 were less likely than Anglo or African American students to have participated in community service: 38 percent compared with 56 and 48 percent, respectively. (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, Status and Trends in the Education of Hispanics)
Nearly two-thirds of college students say they have recently volunteered in community service; 89% of this group volunteered in high school. Students believe volunteerism is an effective form of public service to solve problems on both the local and national level. Eighty percent of undergraduates performed direct service in high school. (The Institute of Politics Survey of Student Attitudes: A National Survey of College Undergraduates, Conducted October 18-27, 2002 by The Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)
According to research, positive outcomes associated with volunteering while in college in the short-term are that students are more likely to show a commitment to: their communities, helping others in difficulty, promoting racial understanding, and influencing social values. Volunteering also influences the development of life skills among undergraduates, including: leadership ability, social self-confidence, critical-thinking skills, and conflict resolution. Finally, in the short-term, volunteering while in college positively affects an undergraduates' academic development, including: knowledge gained, grades earned, degrees sought after, and time devoted to academic endeavors (See: A.W. Astin and L.J. Sax (1998). "How Undergraduates Are Affected by Service Participation." Journal of College Student Development, 39(3): 251-263.)
Long-term positive outcomes - at least through the five years following graduation - include a greater likelihood to: attend graduate school, earn higher degrees, donate to one's alma mater, socialize with persons from different racial/ethnic groups, and participate in volunteer/community service work. Volunteer work in college is positively associated with the following activities after college: helping others in difficulty, participating in community action programs, participating in environmental clean-up programs, promoting racial understanding, and developing a meaningful philosophy of life (See: A.W. Astin, L.J. Sax and J. Avalos (1999). "Long-term Effects of Volunteerism during the Undergraduate Years." The Review of Higher Education, 22(2): 187-202.)
Undergraduate service participation increases the likelihood that the student will donate money to the alma mater. (See: A.W. Astin, L.J. Sax and J. Avalos (1999). "Long-term Effects of Volunteerism during the Undergraduate Years." The Review of Higher Education, 22(2): 187-202.)
