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  (Photo courtesy of AmeriCorps)
Getting More Americans to Serve
Five Strategies The AmeriCorps national service program is a network of more than
3,000 local, state, and national organizations that engage 70,000
Americans each year in intensive service to meet critical needs in
education, public safety, health, and the environment. Under the
leadership of Presidents Clinton and Bush, more than 400,000 men and
women have served since 1994, while at the same time earning money for
college, graduate school, or student loans.
The 10th anniversary of AmeriCorps was a time for many leaders and
service advocates to step back and ask: "Is AmeriCorps working?" "Has
the program lived up to its promise?"
As a partner with City Year, one of the service programs that
inspired the creation of AmeriCorps, the Case Foundation was also
interested in these questions. In particular, what lessons can we learn
from the "AmeriCorps experiment" to help engage not thousands but
millions more citizens in our communities and nation?
That question is answered with five specific recommendations in
the following chapter from a book produced by the Progressive Policy
Institute in partnership with the Case Foundation, The AmeriCorps Experiment and the Future of National Service. Download the entire book or individual chapters.
The Voluntary Path to Universal Service
By Will Marshall and Marc Porter Magee In just over a decade,
AmeriCorps has proved its worth in communities around the country and
has secured a small but vital beachhead in national policy. Its
impressive track record, together with growing public and political
support, points to the possibility of a breakout that could take
national service to truly national scale.
National service ought
to be more than a small demonstration project on the margins of big
government. It must take a great leap forward or risk going the way of
the Peace Corps and VISTA, noble endeavors that languished after an
initial burst of inspiration and failed to reach critical mass.
Why is bigger better?
The first and most compelling reason for expansion is to match the
scale of America's unmet needs. Our country's "social deficit" is as
daunting as our fiscal deficit. Compared with other rich countries, the
United States has very high rates of poverty (especially among
children), out-of-wedlock births, and youth violence, as well as a wide
racial and ethnic gap in educational achievement. Add to these enduring
social problems the new challenges presented by the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the baby boom's retirement, and you have a "to do" list
that overwhelms government's current capacities. We need to mobilize
the nation's civic resources more broadly to tackle such urgent
priorities as:
AmeriCorps' New
Democrat architects envisioned it in the late 1980s as a way to
mobilize citizen volunteers to tackle national problems that neither
government agencies nor private markets could solve by themselves.
Since then, Americans have become more attuned to the possibility of
tackling public problems through new partnerships between the formal
public sector and the informal realm of civic and voluntary groups
(including faith-based organizations). National service is a prime
example of this new, hybrid form of public activism -- a decentralized,
nonbureaucratic way to grapple with a wide array of national challenges. The experience of working together across racial, ethnic, and class lines to solve common problems hones the basic skills of democratic citizenship. A second reason to expand national service lies in its unique
character as a dual public investment in America's human capital.
First, national service volunteers do work that helps to improve the
lives of tens of thousands of needy Americans each day. Second,
volunteers earn education awards that encourage them to attend college
and defray at least some of its costs. Imagine how much a vastly bigger
service enterprise, with a more generous education award, could magnify
these social and economic returns.
There's a third reason to enlarge AmeriCorps: to give more
Americans a chance to serve their country. The demand for service
positions far outstrips the supply. Many of the best-known service
programs, such as Teach for America and City Year, have large waiting
lists. Scaling up AmeriCorps would transform national service from an
exceptional to a fairly common experience for young Americans. And,
like the draft of old, it would be one of the few institutions in our
increasingly stratified and segmented society that throw together
Americans from different social and economic backgrounds. The
experience of working together across racial, ethnic, and class lines
to solve common problems hones the basic skills of democratic
citizenship -- the ability to see past stereotypes, to empathize with
others, to negotiate and compromise, and to transcend our group
identities. In political scientist Robert Putnam's term, it creates the
"bridging" social capital essential to making a multiethnic democracy
work.
FIVE WAYS TO SCALE UP NATIONAL SERVICE
Our ultimate goal should be to make national service a common
expectation -- a rite of civic passage -- for young Americans on their
way to responsible and productive citizenship. Here are five ways we
can reach the next plateau in the evolution of national service:
Replace Selective Service with National Service
When Congress created the All-Volunteer Force in 1973, it kept one
vestige of the old World War II-era draft: the requirement that all
American males register with the Selective Service System on their 18th
birthdays. Registration is a hedge against the unlikely, but hardly
unthinkable, prospect that America may one day need to mobilize for
full-scale war. With a little imagination, the Selective Service System
could be recast as a recruiting device for voluntary national service,
as well as a register of the nation's available manpower.1 Specifically, we should replace Selective Service with a National Service System that recruits young men and women
to serve their country in one of three ways: in the military's new,
short-term "citizen soldier" enlistment program; in AmeriCorps; or in
the Peace Corps, which should become a vital component of U.S. efforts
to promote political and economic freedom abroad.
The new system would channel volunteers into these three streams
of service and handle post-service education awards. As an added
incentive to serve, public and private colleges should be encouraged to
favor applicants who agree to perform national service over applicants
who choose the registration-only option.2
Expand AmeriCorps
President Bush deserves credit for carrying through on his promise
to enlarge AmeriCorps from 50,000 to 75,000 members. But while it's
gratifying to see a Republican president leading his party toward a
belated embrace of President Clinton's signature program, we shouldn't
stop there. In their bipartisan Call to Service bill, Sens. Evan Bayh
(D-Ind.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) set a more ambitious goal:
increasing AmeriCorps to 250,000 members a year, at a cost of about $15
billion, spread out over eight years. In addition to investing more in
the missions that AmeriCorps now tackles -- tutoring students,
constructing houses, vaccinating children, providing disaster relief --
we should also test ways that national service can be harnessed to meet
the daunting new challenges of homeland security.
As we expand service opportunities for young Americans, we should
not neglect the coming wave of baby boom retirees. A recent opinion
survey shows that the percentage of Americans nearing retirement who
are interested in a year or more of service increases fourfold to
almost 50 percent if they are offered a structured service environment,
a small monthly stipend, and the choice of an education or health-care
benefit. 3 Building on the success of the Senior Corps and
the Experience Corps, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has
proposed organizing a large-scale "Boomer Corps" to enable the boomers
to help themselves meet the challenges of healthy and successful aging
and give something back to their country.4
Recruit More Citizen-Soldiers
In October 2003, the military began taking in its first recruits
through the new "citizen-solider" short-term enlistment program, the
most significant change in recruiting since the creation of the
All-Volunteer Force.5 Conceived by Northwestern University
sociologist Charles Moskos and shepherded into law by Senators McCain
and Bayh, the citizen-soldier option is intended to help meet our
growing personnel demands by offering America's youth a voluntary
equivalent of the draft: a way to serve their country in uniform
without choosing a military career.
The new option enables volunteers to sign up for 15 months of
service on active duty followed by 24 months in the reserves -- a
radical departure from the four- and five-year active duty
enlistments that are now the norm. A look at the initial class of 3,600
recruits suggests that the program is already beginning to fulfill its
promise. The short-term program has a much higher percentage of
college-educated and collegebound enlistees than traditional enlistment
programs. It is also providing immediate relief to the active-duty
military positions experiencing the greatest manpower shortages and is
on track to deliver experienced soldiers into a reserve force stretched
thin by frequent mobilizations since 9/11. National service advocates
should urge the president and the Defense Department to support both a
larger military and a more ambitious recruiting goal for this
innovative program: Twenty-five thousand citizen-soldiers per year by
2008 and 75,000 per year by 2012. If lawmakers do nothing else, they should at least fix one big flaw in the 1993 legislation that created AmeriCorps: The education award was set far too low. Replace Work Study with Serve Study
The federal Work Study program helps nearly 1 million students pay
for college at a cost of $1 billion a year. According to Harris
Wofford, former Pennsylvania senator and former chief executive officer
of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Work Study was
designed to provide low- and middle-income students with
additional money to pay for college and increase the number of students
participating in community service. Yet the overwhelming majority of
Work Study students today do their service on campus, not in the
community. In effect, they constitute an enormous pool of cheap labor
for college administrators.
Under current law, only 7 percent of Work Study participants are
required to work in community service. To its credit, the Bush
administration has proposed boosting that to 50 percent by the end of
the decade. That would mean an additional 250,000 students serving in
their communities each year, at virtually no new cost to taxpayers.
This idea, however, has provoked scorched earth resistance from
college administrators and the powerful higher education lobby, who
claim a shift from campus -- based work to service in communities would
interfere with students' education. But a University of California-Los
Angeles study conducted in 2000 suggests that parttime service
activities, far from being a burden on college students, yield positive
outcomes, including better performance in the classroom. 6
National service advocates and the White House should join forces to
insist that Congress not wait another year to begin the process of
replacing mandatory on-campus jobs with real service opportunities for
students.
Link Federal Student Aid and National Service
Finally, it's time to revisit a key principle of the original
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) blueprint: linking federal student
aid and national service. As Moskos has pointed out, the United States
today has "a GI Bill without GIs." That is, the federal government
spends lots of money -- about $26 billion in 2005 -- on grants and loan
subsidies for students. But, whereas the GI Bill rewarded returning
World War II veterans for their service to the nation, college aid asks
little in return, other than that students repay their loans.
At a time when college costs are rising faster than inflation and
a college education has become a minimal credential for success in the
knowledge economy, increased public support for families with modest
means makes sense. But rather than give the aid away, we should make it
an "earned entitlement." Specifically, Washington ought to emulate the
GI Bill of Rights and add an element of reciprocity by requiring those
who benefit to give something back to their country through national
service, civilian or military. The DLC plan would have replaced federal
Pell and other grants with a $10,000 post-service reward and limited
student loans to eligible youths who performed (or committed themselves
to perform) national service. In this way, the plan sought to spur
large numbers of young Americans to volunteer to serve rather than
conscripting them into a mandatory service scheme.
In a more recent variation on this theme, PPI has proposed
consolidating various federal tax provisions into a single,
turbo-charged College Tax Credit that would provide a $3,000-a-year
credit to students for four years of college and two years of graduate
school, provided that they agree to perform service in return.7
If lawmakers do nothing else, they should at least fix one big
flaw in the 1993 legislation that created AmeriCorps: The education
award was set far too low. At $4,750 for a year of service, it is not
even enough to cover tuition and fees at a four-year public college,
which now averages $5,132. It's time for Congress to raise this paltry
amount to at least $10,000 a year so that two years of full-time
service would cover the average cost of four years of tuition and fees
at a public college or university. This would make service more
attractive, especially to youths from low-income families. It also
would help students avoid heavy borrowing and promote personal
responsibility by reinforcing the connection between individual effort
and reward.
CONCLUSION
If adopted, these five steps for taking voluntary national service
to scale would move us closer to the ideal of universal service. And it
would do so without raising the specter of conscription and all the
practical, moral, and political questions it raises. By bringing tens,
and eventually hundreds, of thousands of willing citizens together to
meet the great challenges of our time, we will hasten the day when it
will become routine for Americans to ask each other: What did you do
for your national service
Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) has argued persuasively that the nation's
leaders missed a historic opportunity after 9/11 to summons the "X and
Y generations" to national service: "They are ready to do great things.
But we don't ask anything of them. They have not been challenged."
It's not too late to rectify that mistake, by issuing a new summons to active citizenship through national service.
ENDNOTES
1 For a detailed discussion of this proposal, see Magee, Marc, 2003, From Selective Service to National Service: A Blueprint for Citizenship and Security in the 21st Century, Washington: Progressive Policy Institute.
2 This preference could be modeled on the veterans'
preference in civil service applications. To reflect the greater risk
inherent in military service, those who choose service in the armed
forces could be provided with additional consideration. Participation
by colleges and universities would, of course, be voluntary.
3 While only 13 percent of Americans 55 and older said
they were interested in volunteering 15 hours a week or more during
their retirement, the number increased four-fold to 49 percent for a
national service program with a structured service environment, a small
monthly stipend, and the choice of an education or health care benefit,
according to a 2002 Hart Research Associates Poll cited in Civic
Ventures, 2002, The New Face of Retirement: Older Americans, Civic Engagement, and the Longevity Revolution, Washington.
4 For a detailed discussion of the Boomer Corps proposal see Magee, Marc, 2003, Boomer Corps: Activating Seniors for National Service, Washington: Progressive Policy Institute.
5 For a detailed discussion of the National Call to Serve enlistment program see Magee, Marc and Steven J. Nider, 2002, Citizen Soldiers and the War on Terror,
Washington: Progressive Policy Institute. For benchmarks on how to
scale up this new program, see Magee, Marc and Steven J. Nider, 2003, Uncle Sam Wants You! ... For 18 Months: Benchmarks for a Successful Citizen Soldier Program, Washington: Progressive Policy Institute.
6 Asti, Alexander W., Lori J. Vogelgesang, Elaine K. Ikeda, and Jennifer A. Yee, 2000, How Service Learning Affects Students, Higher Education Research Institute, University of California-Los Angeles.
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The Case Foundation, 2008. All Rights Reserved.
