Where Does Your School Rank in Cranking Out Peace Corps Volunteers?

​Nathan "Hale" Sargent doesn't want to say a bad economy is good for the Peace Corps. That'd be simplistic. That'd be insensitive. A bad economy is bad for everyone.

That being said -- applications in 2009 were up 18 percent over the year before. So there's that.

"We're not Plan B," says Sargent, the Oakland-based public affairs maven for the Peace Corps. "You don't make a 27-month commitment to the Peace Corps because the job you wanted fell through. But this economy is giving people the chance to think about other opportunities." And since there's no upper age limit -- many of those people probably remember exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot.

A good number of those people also figure to be locals. Based on data recently released by the Peace Corps, a handful of local colleges are among its biggest sources of volunteers since Kennedy founded the organization in 1961:

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By the way, getting into the Peace Corps is as competitive or more than cracking many of the schools above. According to Sargent, only 4,000 of the 15,000-plus applicants will get the nod.

Insert your U.C. Santa Barbara joke here.