To get into a top university in the United States, academic achievement isn’t enough; you have to demonstrate “how wonderful you are as a human being” by volunteering for good causes, says Femida Handy, a professor of social policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania. That is not true everywhere. In India, where grades and test scores alone often determine admissions, one high school student told Handy that he didn’t volunteer because colleges wouldn’t take him if they found out he wasn’t studying all the time.
If volunteering makes such a difference, are students doing it primarily to pad their résumés? Handy and an international group of researchers administered a survey in a dozen countries, including Belgium, South Korea, Australia, and Finland, to find out. “Very few people will tell you, ‘I volunteer for myself.’ So what we tried to do was to elicit responses by asking questions about the benefits of volunteering,” says study co-author Ram Cnaan, a social work professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “And regardless [of the question], we found that the No. 1 reason among any group of volunteers is ‘I want to do good.’”
Students did not rate résumé building as their top motivation to volunteer in any country. Altruistic and value-driven motivations always came first. Also, volunteering is no more frequent in the countries where service is assumed to be most useful to the volunteer (primarily Canada and the United States). The highest participation rates—more than 80 percent—were in India and China, where service doesn’t help a student get into a university. Canada and the United States follow closely behind with participation rates in the high 70s, and Croatia and Japan bring up the rear.
These results please Sarah Jane Rehnborg, associate director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service at the University of Texas at Austin. When Rehnborg surveyed 1,500 students for a different study, she didn’t ask whether they were padding their résumés—“It’s a somewhat cynical question”—but 94 percent responded that compassion toward people in need was their motivation for serving. “And even if people are serving to build a résumé, I don’t know that that’s bad,” Rehnborg says. “One of the ways you learn about what you want to do is by getting out there and doing it.”
One strong finding of Handy and Cnaan’s study was that students who volunteer for selfish reasons do it less—they invest fewer hours in service and don’t show up as often. “If you’re motivated more by résumé, all you have to do is a little and it’s on your CV,” says Cnaan. He suggests to administrators that they “make the contract very clear to this type of student.” So do students volunteer just to pad their résumés? “Almost every student you talk with, when you probe for about five minutes, admits he or she was told it was good on the résumé,” says Cnaan. “It’s a major factor. But nobody volunteers only for egoistic motives—they won’t last.”
Femida Handy, Ram A. Cnaan, Lesley Hustinx, et al., “A Cross-Cultural Examination of Student Volunteering: Is It All About Résumé Building?” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 39, 2010
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.