Many career colleges are making service learning a part of their curriculum.  Service learning is not new but it still is not known by a lot of colleges and students.  Service learning is sometimes confused with community service.  Community service has the goal of helping a sector of a community to complete a project or activity.  There is not credit associated with the completion of the project, only the satisfaction of having participated in the effort of helping others.  Service learning can have the same goal but in addition participating students receive credit for their work and the project is a part of their program of study. 

If your college does not have service learning as a part of the curriculum that you are offering you might want to explore how you could make service learning a part of your instructional planning and delivery.  When students take what they are learning out into the community and make application of their newly acquired knowledge and skills they start to see the value of what they are studying.  Service learning can bring relevance to their lives and career goals.  They start to see how helping others in their community to have better lives also makes their lives better as well.  Their civic responsibility is increases as well as their identification to their field.