I guess the agenda-crats in charge of Big Education think that student slave labor disguised as volunteering" as a requirement for certain tax-favored treatment, is a great way to advance their beloved "social justice" agenda items.
Excerpt:
"Molly Corbett, president of the American Council on Education, in a letter to Treasury written on behalf of the council and 20 other higher-education organizations, pointed out that mandatory community service would harm the very low-income students that the tax credit was designed to help, by forcing them to spend precious spare time that could be used to earn money to help support themselves or their families instead volunteering for no pay.
Corbett wrote: 'Contrary to the popular image of undergraduates, part-time, older and low-income students make up a large portion of today's college students....Working students, particularly those with families, have very little free time. Requiring community service to access student benefits would therefore force some to choose between work and volunteer activities....Given that nearly one out of four college students who drop out do so for financial reasons; it is unlikely that students will sacrifice work for community service hours.' Ironically, Corbett noted, wealthy students who might actually have the free time to spare for volunteering would essentially be able to buy their way out of community service because they wouldn't need or might not qualify financially for the tax credit."
And then we have this distinct possibility:
"The potential for interfering with particular colleges' religious and moral visions is vast. Should a Catholic college be obliged to give community-service credit to a student who volunteers for Planned Parenthood? Conversely, how would the politically liberal professors and deans at secular colleges feel about their students' working for an organization opposed to same-sex marriage? Allowing college adminstrators or federal regulators to draw up lists of which volunteer activities are acceptable and which are not would create serious constitutional and other legal problems."
Is there any doubt that a majority of those projects college administrators (or faculty members) or federal bureaucrats would put on such lists would beone that advances some "social justice" agenda item?
On a related note, I'm compiling information for a story about how one of our local "progressive" institutions of higher education sanctions "progressive' agenda indoctrination of students by way of faculty that design a "research" project with a pre-ordained conclusion supporting a "progressive" social agenda talking point.
In a much smaller matter, I recall that my college curriculum included a couple of courses that were called "required electives".
ReplyDeleteDid they require you to perform mandatory "volunteer" work for a social cause?
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