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Megan Treacy joined the Peace Corps after graduating from Boston College in 2005. While working in Namibia as a math teacher, Treacy, 28, said she found it “frustrating” that so many children were coming to school hungry. While at one time she thought she might want to pursue a career in teaching, Treacy returned from Africa to her home in Olney, Md., with an interest in social work.

“I decided that as a teacher I wouldn't be able to have as much of an impact on the underlying problems I was seeing,” Treacy said. After reaching this decision, she applied to the master of social work (MSW) program at Catholic University of America (CUA). She received her degree last spring and was hired as a social worker by the D.C. government to work with at-risk youth and children.

Treacy is part of a generation that, according to pollsters and demographers, has a unique predilection for wanting to build a better world. This is a generation that watched Enron implode and the dot-com bubble pop. When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 2008, precipitating an economic crisis whose effects still linger today, many of them were completing their undergraduate studies or toiling in their first jobs after receiving their baccalaureate degrees. Their formative years were marked by the Columbine shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks and the ensuing wars, and by rising concerns about climate change and the global divide between rich and poor.

Whether they are referred to collectively as Generation Y, the Millennials or the Echo Boomers (which reflects the fact that they were born in numbers that exceeded the peak of the Baby Boom years), pollsters and demographers regularly observe that today's 20-somethings are not content to wring their hands about the state of the world; many of them actually want to do something to make things better. Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their 2000 book “Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation,“ predicted they would become a “powerhouse generation” that would be “celebrated for their collective deeds.”

Talk to graduate school faculty and administrators and you get the sense that Howe and Strauss were onto something. “Students are coming here wanting to have an impact on the world,” said Jim Zabora, dean of CUA's National Catholic School of Social Service. “They talk about specific problems like homelessness, where they feel they can make a difference, and they often have a course mapped out for serving the greater good.”

In response, CUA and other universities are retooling and expanding graduate programs focused on public and community service. Richmond-based Virginia Commonwealth University, for example, has just started offering its highly ranked MSW program via a “distance education” option that combines online coursework with “field education placements” in nonprofit and community agencies. The reason, according to Jim Hinterlong, dean of the VCU School of Social Work, is to meet “rising demand among students for access to high-quality, accredited social work education.”

It is not just schools of social work that are wanting to quench a growing thirst among students for service-related graduate degrees. From teaching and nursing schools to programs in counseling to business schools, universities are sending a clear and consistent message to current and future students: We're providing you with the opportunity to make a difference.

MBAs on a Mission

When Scott Rechler, 30, was applying to MBA programs in 2008-2009, he was struck by what he heard in a meeting with admissions representatives from George Washington University (GWU) School of Business. At a time when there was considerable debate in academia and beyond about the role of U.S. business schools in fomenting “win-at-all-cost” corporate cultures that contributed to many of the headline-grabbing scandals of recent years, GWU was making a new kind of pitch to potential students like Rechler.

“They were one of the first schools to make ethics and social responsibility a core part of their program,” Rechler said. “They said they wanted to prepare business leaders to have a positive impact on communities and society.”

GWU's message resonated with Rechler in a big way. A Harvard graduate with a degree in social anthropology, he worked from 2004 to 2009 with Ashoka, an Arlington-based organization that supports entrepreneurial solutions to social and environmental problems. Since enrolling in the MBA program, Rechler has become CEO of LearnServe International, which trains high school students to become “social entrepreneurs.” While working full time for LearnServe, Rechler will complete his GWU MBA this fall.

Liesl Riddle, associate dean of MBA programs at GWU, explained that the university “completely re-tooled” its MBA curriculum four years ago to emphasize ethics, leadership, and social/environmental responsibility. The first course students take as part of the core curriculum is in business ethics, and business cases in all classes are tailored to incorporate an ethical dimension.

Timothy L. Fort is a GWU professor and author of a number of books on the role of business in fostering peace around the world. His role in the MBA program is to work closely with core faculty to infuse ethics and corporate responsibility throughout the curriculum. “Traditionally, students take a stand-alone course in ethics and then they're done,” Fort said. “But the theory here is that there is an ethical component to virtually every business decision people make.”

GWU, of course, is not the only U.S. business school emphasizing these issues. Just a few miles from GWU's downtown D.C. location, the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business has made a similar commitment to training students, in university's own words, “to use business as a vehicle for social and environmental change.” The Smith School founded the Center for Social Value Creation in 2008 to ensure that students have a variety of opportunities to explore business practices that are socially and environmentally responsible.

“We believe the concept of social value creation cannot be an adjunct to the business school experience,” said Melissa Carrier, executive director of the Smith Center. “It needs to be part and parcel of everything students do.”

One of the signature initiatives of the center is the Grassroots.org Social Venture Consulting program, which assigns MBA students to experiential learning projects with selected nonprofits. To date, more than 300 students have participated in the program.

Among the nonprofits that have worked with student consultants from the Smith School is A Wider Circle, a Silver Spring, Md.-based agency that serves thousands of low-income individuals and families each year. Mark Bergel, founder and executive director of the charity, said that a group of Smith School students worked over a three-month period in 2010 to help A Wider Circle develop a plan for engaging businesses as more active partners in its work.

“I would wager that we have integrated a number of the students' ideas into our processes already,” Bergel said. “They really helped us look at how the business community can and should be front and center in solving the problem of poverty.”

Career or Calling?

Students can prepare for careers in public and community service in a wide variety of ways. Many universities, for example,now offer master's and certificate programs in nonprofit management and philanthropy, while students have long been able to pursue advanced degrees in public policy and government—particularly in the national capital area. George Mason University's School of Public Policy, located in Arlington, Va., has been adding to its graduate program enrollment numbers (and, in turn, growing more selective) every year, according to Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Thys van Schaik.

Van Schaik said the school offers several varieties of master's degrees, the most popular being the master of public policy (MPP), in addition to a PhD program. A common attribute among the school's nearly 1,000 graduate students, he said, is an interest in making a difference in the public policy arena at all levels of government.

“We tend to attract people who think big in terms of what they want to do in their careers,” he said. Graduates of the program, he added, work for a wide range of employers, including federal agencies, national and international nonprofits, and D.C.-area think tanks.

While graduates of public policy programs tend to work in behind-the-scenes jobs as shapers of solutions, growing numbers of students are pursuing advanced degrees in fields such as nursing, education, and counseling, where they can have a direct, face-to-face impact on others' lives.

According to the latest projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment of K-12 teachers should grow by 13 percent between 2008 and 2018, with high demand for teachers in specific subject areas such as math and science and bilingual education. University officials say this is drawing more and more people of all ages to pursue master's degrees in education. Similarly, interest in advanced degrees in nursing has surged in recent years. A 2010 survey from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) found that enrollment in doctoral nursing programs increased by more than 20 percent over the previous year, signaling strong interest among students in careers as nursing scientists, faculty, primary care providers, and specialists.

Students in these fields accept that they might not benefit from the same monetary rewards as many of their MBA-equipped peers. But interviews with students and faculty members at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., suggest that many of these students view their career choice as a calling, and they are intrigued by the possibility of helping others in real and tangible ways.

E. Téarrah Cristiani-Nguyen, for example, has both a master's and a doctorate, the doctor of nursing practice (DNP), from Marymount. She works at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (soon to become the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center) as a nurse practitioner on the cardiothoracic surgical team.

Cristiani-Nguyen has served on active duty in the Army. Currently, her husband is on active duty and her son is at West Point. She said that providing life-saving medical care to soldiers and veterans and their families is “the hardest, most rewarding job I've had in my life.” She added that she decided to pursue her nursing degrees after watching her mother struggle with various heart problems before she passed away in 2000.

Students in graduate programs who are focused on service to others often tell similar stories about how they were inspired to pursue these degrees based on personal experiences. “There is a good chance that many of the people in our program have had an educator or another role model who made a significant impact on their lives, and now they want to do the same for someone else,” said Shannon Melideo, chair of the education department at Marymount.

Melideo added that Marymount continues to enroll a significant number of “career switchers” in its master's programs in education. “These are people who have worked in other fields and have now decided to pursue a lifelong interest in teaching,” she explained.

One such career switcher is Marc Loiselle, 32. After serving in the Army from 1999 through 2007, including two tours in Iraq, Loiselle enrolled in the master's in education program at Marymount. He got his degree last spring and now lives in Seattle, Wash., where he recently took a job as an associate teacher at an independent K-8 school.

Loiselle knew he had decided on the right career while he was working as a student teacher for a semester at Marymount. Assigned to Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, he developed and taught a class on the Harlem Renaissance. “Those times in front of the classroom are so rewarding,” he said. “It's something I wish I could do every day.”