A university program that takes students around the country and the globe to complete community service projects each spring break had a record number of applicants this year. So much for the apathetic college population.

About 400 students are vying for the 180 available spots in the university’s Alternative Spring Break program. That’s a huge number for a program that had only 39 applicants its first year. What the growth of this program shows about today’s university population is that students here are increasingly looking for ways to give back to a world in which they are, as college students, part of an extremely privileged minority.

In 2005, The Princeton Review published a book titled Colleges with a Conscience that looked at the stereotype that college students these days are lazy and self-centered. An article adaptation from the book on the Review’s website states, “Today, 83 percent of Campus Compact member schools house a Community Service or Service-Learning Office, up from only 50 percent ten years ago.”