The intent of the partnership between UGA and the Peace Corps is to promote skills in four key areas identified by the Peace Corps as being essential to future volunteers: foreign language proficiency, intercultural competence, professional savvy and leadership, and other sector-specific skills.
Many students enter UGA with much more on their mind than financial or material success: they want to make a contribution, positively affect the larger world, change lives. These very strong callings - not necessarily exclusive of or separate from financial or material success - are ideals on which the entire 'university' learning context was created. Training, but training to make the world a better place. It's no surprise that the skills to enable that kind of impact in the Peace Corps and beyond are heavily represented in the social sciences and humanities, as alluded to above. Reinforcing the strength and critical importance of that coursework on our campus and our world, how they can and should be integrated into all kinds of degree programs and majors, might be the strongest antidote to troubling declines in humanities degrees.
Image: Unofficial Peace Corps poster from 1970 by artist Peter Max. Other great vintage Peace Corps images here and here.