At some point in the school year, I’ll be scrolling through Instagram when I notice a trend—post after post of colorful graphics announcing a new nonprofit organization started by fellow classmates. A trip to their pages usually yields “youth-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit” in the bio, a well-designed website, and maybe an article or two in the local newspaper about their work.

Their focus can range from environmental to social justice to educational, but every year a new crop of nonprofits created by students seems to pop up like clusters of dandelions in the summertime. Come a year later, they are abandoned, due either to their founders’ graduation or the plain fact that the projects just never got off the ground.  The only proof of their brief existence can be found on Instagram, which serves as a kind of graveyard for these short-lived aspirations to charity.

Some may think, “Okay, some student nonprofits may fail, but there’s still no harm in trying, right? And any positive impact is important, no matter how small.”

Needless to say, the fact that a project fails to become wildly successful does not mean it isn’t worth doing. Even small impacts do good.

But there is a host of reasons why student nonprofits should not be nearly as common as they are and why the apparent ubiquity of them is harmful.

For one, there are the ethical implications of parroting an insincere interest in a particular cause that might not exist independent of a college acceptance letter. But while this happens, it does not describe all students who run nonprofits. No doubt many youth nonprofits are run by students who would do so even if college was not an incentive. Some students genuinely care about their cause and are passionate about making a difference in their communities.

Others, however, may not.

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with undertaking a project with the primary motivation of an improved college application. However, what differentiates starting a nonprofit from other ambitious student endeavors, such as running a business or winning an international competition, is that nonprofits exist to achieve a certain goal—to raise large sums of money for a cause through tax-deductible donations. When a person starts a nonprofit, they are assuming responsibility for that cause, along with the handling of other people’s money. 

As college consultant and blog author Mattie Culkin writes “[M]erely caring more than the next guy does not make you qualified to manage people and money. This goes double when there are real stakes at play. Go ahead and start a business. If you fail, whatever. But when you promise a group that you will help them, and accept donations from your community to support those efforts, but then aren’t able to back those promises up? That’s not cool.”

Starting and maintaining a successful nonprofit organization, like any business, is not easy. While these students may be driven, intelligent, and passionate about their work, that does not make them qualified to run what is essentially a business, as the vast majority do not possess the number of technical skills, knowledge of business fundamentals, or practical experience required. There’s a reason that nonprofits—large nonprofits, run by adults in the real world—fail all the time. There’s a reason they are mostly led by MBAs or senior business leaders with years of specialized experience.

When we look at some of the most successful nonprofits run by students at North Allegheny, such as Project Water or TigerThon, organizations that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for their respective charities over the course of their existence, not only do they achieve this primarily through a few large events throughout the year, but they are run not by an individual or small group — instead, their accomplishments come from the combined labor of dozens of students, including coordinators, members, and volunteers, as well as adult overseers.

This structure most mirrors how nonprofits are run outside of a college-bound high-schooler bubble—and the resulting tangible impact is both quantifiable and significant.

What an influx of small, short-lived nonprofits does is dilute the meaning of a nonprofit organization. Often you will see students start “nonprofit” organizations in which fundraising is not even a part of the equation. This raises the question: Why does an organization where raising significant amounts of money is not a primary purpose need to be a nonprofit at all, when that is what a nonprofit is fundamentally created to do?

That is of course not to say that fundraising is the only way to advance a cause or do good in one’s community. Advocacy and awareness can often be important avenues to help mitigate an issue. However, these initiatives are usually better served through different mediums that are specifically tailored to that purpose, e.g. starting a blog or writing for an already established nonprofit.

The issue is that many seem to think that the only valid option for their initiative is making the organization a nonprofit, even when their goals don’t warrant it. Perhaps this limited vantage point stems from the intrinsic sense of authority people associate with a nonprofit title—the paperwork required, the rules and regulations, the “official” status—leaving other less flashy, but more impactful forms hidden in blind spots.

Another weakness of student nonprofits is their often short longevity due to founders graduating or just losing interest as they transition into a new stage of life. As Sasha Chada writes for the blog Ivy Scholars, “Successfully impacting the lives of the underprivileged often requires a long and concerted effort to produce real change, and a nonprofit with a built-in expiration date is less likely to produce lasting change in the communities it is meant to help.”

One effect of nonprofits becoming commonplace to appeal to college admissions officers is, ironically, it losing its appeal. College admissions officers are not so easily fooled, much as students may try to pull the wool over their eyes—they are trained to discern genuine passion from opportunism. 

Furthermore, the sudden abundance of a nonprofit among activities lists has created a tragedy of the commons of sorts in admissions, with its uniqueness and impressiveness diminishing with each additional applicant who does the same thing. Especially without quantitative measures of the impact your organization had, it’s unlikely that a half-hearted nonprofit will boost an application in the eyes of an admissions officer. Basically, if college is the reason someone is starting a nonprofit, it may not even yield the results they are looking for.

My hope is not to be discouraging or to say that young people as a whole should give up starting nonprofits. This is not meant to be a critique of those students themselves but rather the culture of resume-padding and the college admissions system that feeds it.

For those who have a firsthand perspective on the issue, there is a double-edged nature of student organizations. Victoria Ren, co-founder of the nonprofit STEM and Buds, which provides civic science educational resources and opportunities for kids, shared her thoughts. 

“Sometimes I do feel very conflicted about nonprofits, young people, and that convergence, and in part, that’s ironic because I am objectively a participant of it,” Ren said. “I’ve been critical of my own work and that culture itself. Especially now as I’m transitioning into college, the big question is [this]: What does sustainability look like for funds, for impact evaluation, for maintenance and improvement?”

But as Ren also acknowledges, initiatives like nonprofits can be a great jumping-off point for ambitious students and future pioneers and leaders. They can build valuable confidence and experience that provides a base for those individuals to pursue even greater endeavors, regardless of how successful they initially are.

Student community service initiatives are also able to potentially circumvent some of the institutional drawbacks of nonprofits, like their often bureaucratic nature and the fact that many leaders are too far removed from the issues they are supposed to be helping.

For those that truly do want to start their nonprofit, it is useful to examine and engage in introspection about the motivations, longevity, and necessity of the organization. Question whether the endeavor is sustainable even after graduation, whether the cause is so unique that it is not able to be addressed by an existing organization, and whether the project’s goals actually call for a nonprofit status (i.e., will large sums of money be raised?) or can be achieved through a different approach.

Remember that a charitable project does not need to be a nonprofit to be valid.

As Ren put it, “Nonprofits do not equate to the legitimacy of your work. Legitimacy comes from the impact you create.”