November 15 , 2004

Colleges Say, Don't Bother to Dabble

By LAURA RANDALL

Published: November 15, 2004

ALISON COHEN, a high school senior, started volunteering at age 13, when she signed up to tutor underprivileged sixth graders. Since then, she has dug ditches for an irrigation pipeline in El Salvador, coordinated sock drives for a homeless shelter, picked chard at a farm that donates produce to a hunger relief group and raised money to buy goats for refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan.

As vice president of community service at San Francisco University High School, Ms. Cohen, 17, has already surpassed the 27 hours of community service that the private school requires of seniors. She is in the college application process with an eye on Yale and Williams. But she has no expectation that her better-than-average volunteer record will give her an edge.

"The only mention it really gets is that I have this community service leadership position," she said. She figures that her standing as a legacy student at one of the schools, coupled with a 3.85 grade point average and an SAT score of 1,530, will carry significantly more weight than her spending four hours a week collecting canned goods or overseeing another student's chemistry homework.

College admissions officials are most likely to agree. As more high schools require a set number of community service hours to graduate, admissions offices are taking a harder look at an applicant's volunteer activities, quick to separate the weekend charity walkathons from the deeper commitments. A decade ago, Ms. Cohen's list of accomplishments may have been considered a tipping factor in her college applications. Now, these activities may not even be noticed unless they are woven into a life-changing experience in her essay or praised in a recommendation letter, guidance counselors say.

"Colleges are much more savvy about the ways they evaluate a student's service and more adept at discerning which actually have been continued over a longer period of time and which activity the student is just taking care of because they think, `O.K., I need to do this,' " said Nancy Donehower, college counseling director at the Head-Royce School in Oakland, Calif.

About 7 percent of colleges place considerable importance on extracurricular activities, including volunteer work, a 2003 report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling says. In contrast, 23 percent place a high value on the written essay and 18 percent on a teacher's recommendation letter.

"At one point, it was a trend to acquire as many extra activities as you could get," said David Hawkins, the association's director of public policy. "The attitude was just go ahead and throw them in there. That has come and gone."

That does not mean that counselors are advising students to ditch volunteer activities, but many say they are warning them not to bother if their goal is strictly to appear well rounded on applications.

"Look, if you're a star basketball player, it's a much better trump card to have," says Marjorie Jacobs, director of guidance at Scarsdale High School in New York. Still, Ms. Jacobs encourages her students to participate in volunteer programs like mentoring and with Habitat for Humanity, and estimates that 75 percent of them do so during high school.

"It gives them something to talk about, and I think colleges enjoy seeing that," she said. "But I also don't think kids get rejected because they didn't have community service on their applications."

They don't, college admissions officials say. "I don't key on service, but I do value it," said William M. Shain, dean of admissions at Vanderbilt. "What is upsetting is the phone calls you get that ask, `Are 400 hours of community service enough for Vanderbilt?' People want rules, and the truth is we're looking for thoughtfulness, caring, constructive activity and personal growth, but there are many, many ways to achieve that."

Family responsibilities, for example, have come to mean as if not more than volunteering, said Roz Sternlieb, a college counselor at Grover Cleveland High School in Ridgewood, Queens.

"A lot of times my students come from first-generation or single-parent households," she said. "They have to pick up the younger brother or sister or serve as a translator for their parents, and don't have as much time for volunteer work as some of the other kids. So when I'm working on applications, I use that. It has a very strong impact."