Free Students: Really and Opportunity?

The New York Times featured the continuing trend of using undergrad or grad student projects as "consultants" to help for-profit and nonprofits achieve a particular goal -- mostly in the area of planning.

The article did a nice job of telling the good side where outcomes matched goals and folks did ok.  But this is, in my experience, only one side of the story.  The number of student/class groups I have witnessed that fail or do at best a mediocre job far outweighs the success stories.  More importantly, little was noted about the need for time and supervision by the recipient ("free" costs money) and the very little support given by the professors "managing" the class and their project.

No, class projects are not all they are chalked-up to be.  The successes are limited and if the beneficiary is lucky, the most it will cost is a lot of time.

Comments

[Heather Carpenter]

It is too bad that you have had such a bad experience witnessing students doing these project.

I conducted an extensive literature review this past semester because I wanted to find out what impact to students' service-learning projects have in local nonprofit organizations?

all the studies I read showed positive results. Overall nonprofits are pleased with the work the students are providing in many cases, work the nonprofits would not be able to do. Nonprofits were also pleased with the new partnerships that were established with the Universities. I think I read 10-15 different studies that evaluated the community impact of service-learning projects in local nonprofit organizations. One of the studies included 99 different nonprofits that had partnerships with 8 different Universities in California. I would be happy to direct you to these studies.

Heather