“There are other factors- the availability of good, appealing opportunities to volunteer that make young people feel they can make a difference-that are much more important in determining how much volunteering takes place among teenagers.”ĭietz and Bloom argue that how schools structure those activities can make the difference between students who later disconnect and those who become lifelong volunteers. State policies “just don’t have as much influence as people think they do,” Dietz said. That puts the Old Line State in the top 20 states for volunteering among those age groups, but far below the top volunteering states.
In Maryland, the only state that requires community service hours for graduation, 34 percent of high school students and 33 percent of college students reported volunteering. Among the 10 states with the lowest volunteer rates, Alabama requires service learning, while Tennessee does not. Top-10 states Maine and Michigan both have service-learning requirements in their civics standards, but fellow leading states Kansas and Nebraska do not. (The institute plans to release a follow-up study later this month, digging into what might be behind the differences in states’ volunteering rates.) Kansas, Maine, and Nebraska led the country, with more than 40 percent of students volunteering-while in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Tennessee, fewer than 1 in 5 teenagers got involved. Teenagers overwhelmingly volunteer through organizations, the Do Good study found, with school-sponsored service activities leading the pack.Īlthough 41 states require students to take a civics course to graduate, just 11 require students to be involved in service learning projects, and only Maryland requires students to complete a set number of independent community-service hours to earn a high school diploma, according to a separate study by the Brookings Institution.īut the University of Maryland researchers found that differences in policies on civics or volunteering were not associated with the widely disparate state-level rates of volunteering and giving, and volunteering in high school looked very different in different states. Those rates are higher than any time since the Census began tracking the attitudes in the mid-1960s. Paul, Minn., that was not involved with the study. But many people think that citizens can get to age 18, jump in, and do well and care about ,” said Jennifer Bloom, the executive director of the Learning Law and Democracy Foundation, a nonprofit civic education organization in St. “Civic engagement is much like a sport you can’t jump into a game without understanding the rules and practicing it. Less than a quarter donate to charity, a rate that has been flat since 2008.
About 25 percent of teenagers volunteered in 2015, down from 28 percent in 2005-ending 30 years of rising volunteerism among high-school-age Americans. Across every age group, volunteering has declined since 2005, it found. Census data to track rates of volunteering and charitable giving by Americans from high school age to retirement age, from 2002 to 2015. The University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute, which studies civics, used U.S. High school and college students are less likely to volunteer or give to charity today than they were 15 years ago, even as young adults express the most interest in community engagement in a half-century.
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