Volunteer Program Helps Students Get Lesson in Life

Students at pricey universities such as Notre Dame, Yale and Stanford are dishing up meals in soup kitchens, counseling abused children and helping the homeless in a domestic version of the Peace Corps.

The work helps defray tuition that can exceed $10,000 a year, but for the students--many of them more accustomed to spending summers by the lake than on the soup line--the volunteerism offers extra education.

“I think for some of our students, those who have grown up in wealthy suburbs, it brings them into contact with a segment of society they’ve never encountered,” said Notre Dame spokesman Richard W. Conklin.

“Enough of them have come back and given witness to the fact that it was a lasting experience,” Conklin said. “It caused reflection that really changed their attitudes, especially a wider recognition of the less fortunate.”

Yale recently announced a program to give students $2,000 stipends for taking community service jobs across the country each summer. A similar program began last summer at Stanford, offering $1,300. Both are based on the James Andrews Summer Scholars Program, which gives about 24 Notre Dame students $1,400 each in tuition money to pursue public service projects.

Stanford’s tuition is $13,569 a year, Yale’s is $14,000 and Notre Dame’s is $11,315.

While tuition stipends may be recent, campus volunteerism certainly isn’t.

“We’ve got a tradition here of volunteering,” Conklin said. “About two-thirds of Notre Dame students engage in volunteer services and about one in 10 devotes a year of social service upon graduation.”

More than half of DePauw University’s 2,400 students in Greencastle, Ind., participate in public service projects, including overseas missionary work and visiting prison inmates. At Yale, more than 2,000 students a year donate time, as did 70% of Stanford’s graduating seniors last year.

“I do hope it does change the image of college students of today as not just partygoers,” said Sue Cunningham of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, which oversees the Andrews program in South Bend, Ind.

The 9-year-old program was begun as a memorial to Andrews, an alumnus and co-owner of Universal Press Syndicate. It is financed with contributions from the syndicate’s talent, including “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau and advice columnist Abigail van Buren.

The fund is worth more than $350,000, according to Conklin, who said he knows of no universities other than Stanford and Yale with similar programs.

Last summer, 94 Notre Dame students participated in public service projects and 34 were given stipends through Andrews scholarships.

Despite the assurance of a paycheck at the end of the summer, the big payoff is often emotional. In the fall, the Andrews recipients gather to share stories about their summer of social work.

“There’s not a dry eye in the house after that dinner. The stories, however brief, are very poignant,” said Conklin, whose daughter, Christina, spent a summer working in a home for abused children in Minneapolis.

Notre Dame students have helped inner-city youth in Cleveland, counseled pregnant teen-agers in Michigan, served meals to shut-ins in South Carolina and run a religious camp for second-graders in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.

“It’s an eye-opener to many of them,” Conklin said. “These experiences take hold. It’s not ‘I’m a three-day dilettante in the city of Chicago.’ ”

Stanford’s program had a modest start with three students who worked in a neighborhood health care center, counseled families with dropouts and taught a creative arts and writing program.

At DePauw--Vice President Dan Quayle’s alma mater--public service is emphasized in a program offering a fifth year of classes tuition-free. Students must take a majority of their classes outside their undergraduate major, pay for their room, board and books, and carry a 3.2 grade-point average. The annual tuition normally is $10,550.