Service is an essential part of education, colleges say, and important to this generation of students.
"By doing it right away, an institution shows students its expectations of what their student experience will be," said James Liberman, first-year programs coordinator at the University of Minnesota. "Here, it's an expectation that students incorporate the Twin Cities into their academic and social life."
The number of colleges and universities doing the same has "definitely grown," particularly in the past five years, said Sue Kelman, spokeswoman for Campus Compact, a national group of more than 1,100 college and university presidents committed to civic engagement in higher education.
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