Anne makes an excellent point in her op-ed. Colleges ought to focus on the education students need instead of coercing them into spending time on “community service” if they want to keep their federal funds.

The U.S. is fast becoming a nation so heavily politicized that the government has ways of controlling people at every turn.

Students who want to participate in community service are entirely free to do so. Trying to compel those who don’t by threatening to take away federal funding will mostly lead to evasion and fakery, I suspect, just as hordes of high-school kids these days affect to have a resume studded with “service” commitments to impress college-admission committees.

Wasting time and turning students into dissemblers is bad enough, but there is also the looming prospect that the definition of “community service” may become politicized.

All of this is another reason why the government should have stayed out of the business of college financing.