The ACM Code of Ethics lists contributing to society and human well-being as well as improving public understanding of an engineer’s practice area. Through service learning provides engineers with the opportunity to both contribute to society and educate the public.
Along with fostering a good community-university relationship, educators hope incorporating service learning will increase diversity and retention in the engineering school. Diversifying the engineering population will allow engineering teams to maintain a better understanding of the needs in a society. So diversifying engineering teams will allow engineers to both meet real needs as well as provide interfaces to their solutions which the public can understand. Likewise, a society needs a vast population of engineers to meet the needs of a vast society.