Colorado is proving to be fertile ground when it comes to recruiting volunteers for the Peace Corps.
In lists released Monday of the schools with the highest number of alumni in the Peace Corps, four Colorado universities make the top 20 in their respective categories. Leading off at No. 3 among large universities is the University of Colorado, a perennial Peace Corps powerhouse that usually ranks among the top five universities in the nation for churning out Peace Corps volunteers. In 2005, 82 Peace Corps members were CU graduates.
In the Peace Corps’ 45-year history, nearly 2,000 CU students have signed up.
“CU-Boulder just draws the type of students we are looking for,” said Jill Thiare, a spokeswoman for the Peace Corps’ Denver recruitment office. “They tend to be more internationally aware, and they definitely seem to be interested in social issues and giving back.”
Colorado State University ranks 13th among large colleges, with 57 volunteers.
In the small-colleges category, Colorado College is 11th and the University of Denver is 19th, with 20 and 18 volunteers, respectively. For the 20th consecutive year, the University of Wisconsin at Madison has sent the most graduates on to the Peace Corps, with 104 in 2005.
The Peace Corps is a nationwide volunteer effort that takes U.S. citizens over 18 years of age – most of them college graduates – and sends them to developing nations to work in such fields as education, health, disease prevention, agriculture, community development and the environment.
Thiare said the Peace Corps often gives college graduates skills that make them more valuable in the workforce.
Rich Wildau, a CU and Peace Corps alumnus, said the two were complementary. Wildau was going to graduate school in psychology at CU when he joined the Peace Corps in 1969.
Part of his service, in Ecuador, allowed him to work with a Harvard professor in the area of achievement motivation. When he returned to CU to finish his graduate degree, he used much of that work to write a paper.
“It was always an attraction for me, and I got good support from the graduate school staff,” he said.
Staff writer John Ingold can be reached at 720-929-0898 or jingold@denverpost.com.
