Education, Financial Status Key to Determining Who Volunteers

The least-educated and poorest Americans are also the least likely to volunteer, attend religious services, and engage in other measures of “civic health,” reports The Washington Post.

According to a report by the National Conference on Citizenship, people without high-school diplomas lagged the better-educated in almost every one of 40 measures of civic involvement. They vote at half the rate of college graduates, and are less than half as likely to attend community events.

Social scientists suggested a number of causes for the gaps, including the instability of working-class families and the weakening of labor unions and other institutions that traditionally have anchored such families.

The report also said that people younger than 25 were volunteering more than in the past, but that the increase was due largely to a rise in volunteering among upper- and middle-class people.

“If we continue to have a substantial and growing gap between people coming out of the middle class and people coming out of the lower class, we are going to be in a serious pickle in civic terms,” said Robert D. Putman, a Harvard professor of government.