Mark Helms, Dean of Student Life and Service-Learning
Central Piedmont Community College
Ardette* is pierced, tattooed, street-smart, quirky, and very bright. She was shy as a child, and as a young adult she considers herself an outsider. She drifted through high school without much thought of college. After graduation she applied for a few jobs, but quickly learned that she was not qualified for any job that faintly interested her. Confused, looking for direction, Ardette enrolled at the local community college.
First semester, she joined a student club committed to community service. She attended a couple weekend service projects and met a few new friends. She soon got to know a coordinator in the Service-Learning program. She enjoyed their conversations about life, meaning, and purpose, and she enjoyed being around other students who wanted to give something back.
Next semester, Ardette enrolled in a psychology course and signed up for a service-learning project as a senior-buddy in a retirement home. Having never been around old folks, she was nervous about her first visit. She worried about what they would think of her piercings, and she wondered what they might talk about. The first visit felt a little awkward, but Ardette will always remember the way her new senior friends’ eyes brightened with excitement when she went back the second week. She continued her regular visits through the semester, and she visits her friends there still, even though she has completed her associate degree and transferred to the university to continue her studies.
There are an untold number of stories about how students like Ardette find purpose and motivation through community engagement experiences. Service-learning faculty and coordinators well know that the work we do is intricately tied to student learning, success, and completion, and it develops good community leaders.
Success stories are compelling. But in higher education today, with a renewed priority on student success and completion, compelling stories are not enough. It is imperative that we measure the impact that engagement has on student success and back up our stories with data. It is only with solid and relevant data that we can prove the real value of community engagement, and that community engagement can remain a “mission critical” component of higher education.
Central Piedmont Community College recently conducted research that focused on 2773 students enrolled in academic service-learning courses between Fall 2006 and Spring 2010.** We compared them to a randomly selected group of students enrolled in different sections of the same course during the same semester, but who did not have a service-learning experience. The research findings were remarkable: our service-learning students successfully completed their courses at a 23% higher rate; service-learning students were retained at a 20% higher rate; and service-learning students earned graduation credentials at a 17% higher rate than non-service-learning students.
Whether our student stories are anecdotal or data-based, the ending is nearly always the same: civic engagement experiences have a very high correlation with student success and completion. As we tell these success stories, we must remember that both storylines are essential to our ability to articulate the value of civic engagement in helping our students complete their credentials and move on to become productive citizens who help develop and sustain healthy communities.
* Ardette is a fictional student whose story is loosely based on the stories of several students at CPCC.
**For more information about the CPCC service-learning research, go to: http://www.cpcc.edu/service-learning/service-learning-connections/1connections-spring-2011.pdf