School Service Mandate Might Reduce Volunteering, Study Says

New research suggests community-service requirements for students could make them less likely to volunteer as they get older, writes Education Week.

A study previewed online by the Economics of Education Review found that volunteering rose among 8th-grade students in Maryland after the state implemented a 75-hour service-learning requirement for high school graduation, but has declined sharply among 10th and 12th graders.

Maryland is the only state to have a service-learning mandate for graduation, but several cities have enacted similar rules, including Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.

“[H]ow do we know [students] are considering this as community service, rather than just homework for school?” said Sara E. Helms, the study’s author and an assistant professor of economics at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala. “One of the interpretations that is more convincing is, maybe we are substituting this for being self-motivated. Does it dilute the signal value of volunteering?”