Over at Minding the Campus, University of Wisconsin professor Donald Downs has a good essay on the student-engagement movement.

Student engagement? Does that mean how busy they are with their course work? Well, no — it’s about how busy they are with things other than their coursework, but not including the usual college stuff of sports and parties. The idea is to keep track of “community service,” artistic and cultural pursuits, and so forth. This can even take the form of a separate transcript.

High-school students these days are under great pressure to show such “engagement” to make themselves look exceptional to college-admissions people. It leads to a lot of claims that are dubious at best. Now this is creeping into college as well. For serious students, it is apt to be mostly a distraction, and for non-serious students, a temptation to deceive.