Pillrs aims to empower socially minded people to make a huge impact, right from their couch. So naturally, one day after a few too many hours of bug fixing and development, someone asked an interesting question:
Which college creates the most altruistic students?
Having no idea – most of us went to colleges that are “the best in the world (as long as you don’t count anyone better)” – we turned to the Washington Monthly university rankings, which ranks schools on social mobility, research, and service. It was there that we found the answer.
So without ado, here’s the map of the top school in each state for altruistic / community service-minded students.

Most Socially Minded Schools, Tabulated Data
Here’s the full rankings. Order lists the school’s ranking on our list of the top school for each state, accounting only for top schools.
Also listed is the Rank Among all Universities Considered, which accounts for every university on Washington Monthly’s data. For example, two Schools in California are ranked above Tulane University (Order #4, Rank #5) – we only list the top school for the state, UC Riverside in this example, bumping Tulane’s Rank down one and mismatching its order.
About the rankings
All of our data was gathered from the Washington Monthly college rankings. Their full selection criteria is published here.
For simplicity, we’ve included the relevant information about their community service score, which was used to generate this graph (emphasis added and styled for readability):
We determined the community service score by measuring each college’s performance in four equally weighted measures.
1. We judged military service by collecting data on the size of each college’s Air Force, Army, and Navy ROTC programs and dividing by the number of students.
2. We similarly measured national service by dividing the number of alumni currently serving in the Peace Corps by total enrollment.
3. The final two measures are based on data reported to the Corporation for National and Community Service by colleges and universities in their applications for the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll. One measure is the percentage of federal work-study grant money spent on community service projects.
4. The second measure is more complicated and includes the percent of students doing community service, the number of hours of community service per student, whether any staff were employed in community service, if any service courses were offered, or if the institution provides scholarships for community service.
Colleges that did not submit applications in a given year had no data and were given zeros on these measures.