Service learning with student organizations

Recently, there has been an increased demand on fiscal accountability in all sectors, but perhaps even more so in the educational arena. Recruitment and retention have become very important in a time of shrinking engineering enrollments. This means that special efforts need to be made to attract new students to our engineering and applied sciences college, especially underrepresented minorities and women. At the same time, extra efforts need to be made to retain the students already recruited. All of this takes time and money. The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at Arizona State University (ASU) has a plan that supports both recruitment and retention within the college in a cost effective manner, while at the same time it provides service learning to students. Starting last year, in a pilot project, a student organization and the Associate Dean for Student and Business Affairs contracted a win-win solution. The Engineering Dean's Office provided money for air fare to an annual national conference in exchange for service hours for recruitment and retention activities of the college. The experiment was very successful and has now been expanded to other student organizations. This paper will describe how the exchange works and the types of services done by the students.