Today’s society values all the right things for all the wrong reasons. Community service, although toward a good cause, doesn’t necessarily entail good morals behind it.

With college acceptance rates at an all time low, students are forced to stand out from one another. This new competition ignites new ways to be the best, the newest installment being community service.

Senior Jordan Kiss said, “There is no [longer] integrity in community service. Students are either forced to by a teacher for a grade or a ploy to make themselves look better.”

Though still a valued contribution, regardless of the morals behind it, community service seems to no longer hold the value it once did.

Senior Ethan Wallace said, “Community service seems to be so ubiquitous now that it’s value has near diminished.”

Furthermore, some students go as far as to disregard doing community service altogether and blatantly lie to universities about it in order to increase their chances. Even more concerning, this immoral strategy actually manages to work for some.

“I know someone who lied about beach clean ups and rescuing animals and subsequently got into UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara) with sub-par grades,” said junior Teo Vargo.

With cases like these popping up on occasion, the question arises as to whether or not colleges will take any extensive action.

A vast majority of schools, if notified or manage to figure out themselves, would reject a student nearly immediately for lying about community service or any other activities. These schools are not talking about proclaiming that a student did five hours of community service a week when they really did two, these schools are looking for blatant liars whose integrity is clearly lacking.

This new elite competition created by warring universities has caused students to no longer do community service for the want to help society. Even further to subconsciously push some students to contemplate lying through their teeth in order to make them look just that fraction better.

Community service, always a valuable and irreplaceable trade in today’s society, is more often than not done for the grade. It can only be the hot thing to do for so long, only time will tell how long community service will stick around.