• Definition of Service Learning
  Service-learning links classroom learning with service to communities. Service opportunities are developed through collaboration among faculty, students, and individuals and organizations in the community. Service placements are designed to meet two criteria: to enhance the educational goals of a course and to serve the public good by providing a needed service to individuals, organizations, schools, or other entities in the community.
• Definition of Civic Engagement
  Civic Engagement includes service learning, but encompasses some act ivies that extend beyond the scope of service learning. Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern are civic engagement. It can take many forms, from individual voluntarism to organizational involvement to electoral participation. It can include efforts to directly address an issue, work with others in a community to solve a problem or interact with the institutions of representative democracy.
• 73% of employers think that colleges and universities should place more emphasis on integrative learning where students apply their knowledge in real-world settings according to a recent poll by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
• In 2006, Morgan Stanley began offering job deferral, relocation bonuses, and summer internships to seniors accepted into both Teach for America and Morgan Stanley programs. "We want employees who are committed to serving the community as well as to serving shareholders," says David Puth, Morgan Stanley's head of global currency and commodities (Fortune, November 2006).
• In 2002, U.S. News and World Report initiated a ranking system for college "service-learning" programs as part of the magazine's effort to highlight academic programs that lead to student success.
• The National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America's Promise in its 2007 report College Learning for the New Global Century calls for every student to engage in some form of field-based learning.
• Campus Compact reports that students working in areas such as literacy, health care, hunger, homelessness, voting, and the environment have contributed more than $5 billion in service to their communities since 2001.