Graduates flocking to service programs

Despite her double major in political science and art history and her plans for law school, senior Anna Strand will be off to St. Louis after graduation to teach for two years in a poverty-stricken school as part of the national teaching corps program Teach For America.

“I never really thought about teaching before, but the more I learned about the program, the more I wanted to do something completely different for two years where I knew that without question, I would be helping out every day,” Strand said.

Strand is one out of 225 other IU students this year who have considered halting their original career plans to apply for Teach For America.

That number has grown from fewer than 200 applicants last year.

With the economy mired by a recession, more college graduates are turning to service organizations for post-graduate work.

Nationally there has been an increase in the number of applications from college students to national service programs, said representatives from Teach For America and AmeriCorps, a national community service volunteer program.

Trevor Stutz, national communications manager for Teach For America, said the increase in applications this year shattered what had already been a record-breaking number of applications last year.

“This year, over 35,000 people applied, which is a 42 percent increase from last year, when there were about 25,000 applicants,” he said.

Siobhan Dugan, public affairs specialist for AmeriCorps, said the program received 9,731 online applications in February of this year, whereas it received 3,159 online applications during the same month in 2008.

“And these are just our online applications,” Dugan said. “There are people who apply directly to AmeriCorps programs, but there is no way to find out those numbers.”

Dugan also said AmeriCorps expects even larger numbers in the summer after many students finish school.

“Obviously we can’t predict the future, but at this rate, it’s been a consistent growth over the last four months,” Dugan said, adding that the economy is the likely cause. “We speculate there will be many more applications.”

Arlington Williams, professor of economics and director of the undergraduate economics program, said the economy definitely has something to do with the increased interest in national service. He said such a rise is also likely to occur with the number of applications for graduate schools because they are a common substitute for post-graduation work.

“It would make a tremendous amount of sense to me that when people have difficulty finding jobs in the traditional job market that they would tend to look at endeavors like that,” Williams said.

Such a drastic increase in students’ interest has brought up speculation among the organizations as to the reasons behind the increases.

“The thing that most people jump to is that it’s the economy,” Stutz said. “But what we’ve seen is that while the economy has provided some increase in competition, really we’ve been seeing that so many people have been inspired by considering more options.”

Part of that inspiration, both Stutz and Dugan said, comes largely from President Barack Obama’s call to service in January after the inauguration.

“It’s important to note that people who are now in college seem to be very idealistic and interested in volunteering and working within their communities,” Dugan said. “There’s a native interest there that has been tapped into, and we think that the message of service is really getting across. This is the result.”

Besides the 225 Teach For America applications this year that came from IU, Stutz said 11 percent of graduating students at Ivy League universities applied, along with 8 percent from the University of Michigan and 25 percent from Spelman College, a historically black liberal arts school in Atlanta.

Colleen Clark, who participated in the AmeriCorps program from July 2006 to May 2007 and is now a second-year graduate student at the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs, said she was able to fulfill her desire to serve as well as temporarily postpone her job search.

After her experience with AmeriCorps, in which she completed service projects in four states, Clark said she realized the benefits of spending time off after graduation. She was able to develop valuable professional skills while working in a rewarding environment, she said.

And now, with an economic recession and a new political climate, Clark said she sees even more of a reason for students to consider service as an option after graduation.
“It’s been a horrible time to look for a job, but it’s a perfect time to look for a job in national service,” she said.

Many graduate schools across the nation also provide special financial aid incentives for alumni of national service programs. According to the Web site for the Graduate School of Public and Environmental Affairs, returned Peace Corps, AmeriCorps and Teach For America volunteers who are admitted into the school can have a certain amount of credit hours automatically waived from their coursework.

For Strand, former president of IU College Democrats, the law school incentive is just another reason why she said she became so interested in Teach For America. And with her plans to attend law school, Strand said she expects her experience with the program to make her uniquely prepared for her future.

While she said she has mostly been set on law school, she is still somewhat undecided about exactly what she wants to do.

“These two years are really going to help me scope down what I would like to do,” Strand said.

With the growing number of applications received for Teach For America, Stutz said the program will remain highly selective, although some growth is expected in the next few years. He said the program placed 3,600 new corps members last year, and it expects to place more than 4,000 new members this year. Still, he said the program cannot grow nearly as much as the demand for spots in it.

“It will be even more selective than it was last year,” Stutz said. “But it really just provides us the opportunity to select outstanding people from a record pool of applicants.”