School’s Service Learning Program Again Honored as One of Nation’s Best

Freshmen at DePaul University are currently arriving on campus, and they will quickly get an orientation into the university’s Vincentian mission of charity and service.

Nearly 1,000 DePaul freshmen and new transfer students will take part in the school’s New Student Service Day on Sept. 6. The students will fan out to 40 different locations throughout the city to perform charitable works and community service tasks. Several groups of students will be joining with the Alliance of the Great Lakes to take part in lakefront clean-up at four Chicago city beaches, including Ohio Street Beach and Oak Street beach. The students will be available for media between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on the day of the event at those locations.

The event comes on the heels of DePaul’s service learning program earning another national honor. In late August, DePaul’s program was listed in the U.S. News & World Report’s annual "America’s Best Colleges" edition, and ranked among the nation’s top 19 "Programs to Look For" in service learning. This is the third straight year the publication has honored DePaul in this category.

New Student Service Day is one of two annual days of service for DePaul students, faculty, staff and alumni organized by the University Ministry community service office. In the spring, another group of more than 1,000 volunteers take part in the annual Vincentian Service Day, honoring the spirit of the school’s patron, St. Vincent de Paul, the 17th-century French priest who was known as the "Apostle of Charity." The two days result in more than 8,000 hours of community service tasks being performed in Chicago every year.

Additionally, DePaul was recently recognized as one of the country’s best universities for fostering social responsibility and public service by a national guidebook. The book, titled "Colleges with a Conscience," was published last month by Princeton Review and notes 81 colleges and universities that excel in developing socially engaged students. The schools selected to appear in the book were chosen from a pool of more than 900 colleges and universities nationwide, and DePaul was one of only four Illinois universities so honored.

With a total enrollment of 23,570 students on two city and four suburban campuses, DePaul is the largest Catholic university in the United States and the nation’s eighth-largest private university. DePaul is an innovative and diverse university offering pragmatic educational programs that instill values, including a commitment to community service.