My Unsolicited Opinion: Making Public Service Mandatory

American history is studded with the rhetoric of national service, from our multiple national holidays to celebrate veterans and military members to JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,” speech. Service is often referenced by CEOs, politicians and other successful people as one of the most influential aspects of their own lives, and both millennials and Gen Z’s are more interested than ever in joining programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and Teach for America.

As a junior in college I committed to joining the corps at Teach for America, a non-profit program that fast-tracks its members to a teaching license and connects them with schools that serve low-income communities. For two years I taught 4th grade math at a Title I school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the end of my two years, I received a $10,000 grant that I used to pay for a Master’s in Public Administration, and then I started working for a family foundation outside of the education sector.

A lot of the critics of Teach for America will harp on the fact that I ultimately left teaching, entirely missing the point that joining the corps gave me two years to have massive impact on my students, which also had a massive impact on me. The school I worked at was both underfunded and understaffed, and I was able to provide resources, time, and attention to students who otherwise might not have gotten. I left education, but my time as a teacher will never leave me. I have firsthand experience with how the public education system actually works in America, and how it impacts communities very different from the one I grew up in. I carry that understanding with me into my everyday interactions with people, into where I donate my money, into how I vote. I wouldn’t have this perspective without that, and while it exposed so many of America’s flaws to me, it’s also something that made me believe in doing the work everyday to make this country a better place for everyone to live.

The ideological, political, and culture divide is deepening across America, and in turn so are the income, education, and opportunity gaps that exist. That’s why I think developing a mandatory public service program is so interesting. While mandating public service has been in the political conversation for decades, it popped up most recently in the 2020 presidential race. Several democratic candidates called for a national public service program, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman John Delaney. Pete Buttigieg said that national service among young adults would help foster unity in America, and that it should become a conversation colleges and universities are already having with their students preparing to graduate.

Even more recently, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic a group of bipartisan senators crafted a proposal called the Cultivating Opportunity and Response to the Pandemic through Service (CORPS Act) that would have drastically expanded access to national services and through AmeriCorps positions, which are active across all fifty states. There is also international precedent for a mandatory public service program.

As Elizabeth Warren says, she has a plan for that, and here’s mine: creating a government funded program requiring one year of public service, to be completed anytime between your twentieth and thirtieth birthday.

A public service is anything that is intended to serve all members within a community, which usually is facilitated through the government, although in some cases can be privatized or subsidized through volunteers. Think education, police/fire/EMS, military, healthcare, the justice system, transportation and social services. The value of public service is that everyone gets equal access to these services at low or no cost (I wouldn’t want to have to hire a firefighter when my house is burning down, for example). But in my experience, public service is just as valuable to the people doing the serving as those being served.

We rely on public service sectors in order for our society to function, but public service workers are often underpaid and undervalued, and therefore are consistently understaffed. A mandatory public service year would help not only to fill that resource gap, but also to help to instill the value of public service in every individual, who will then take that experience with them when they vote, pay taxes, and participate in their communities. That’s a value I believe every American should have and should have early in their adult life, which is why completing a mandatory public service year at some point in your twenties would be the most beneficial for society and for us personally.

Honestly, what America doesn’t need is more hot-shot twenty-three year old investment bankers bragging about their Upper East Side apartments or how they’ve been awake for the past 48 hours working on some company’s IPO. We need twenty-three year old teachers who use their energy to get down on the ground and play with their students, or twenty-three year old government administrators who can help bring our antiquated systems into the 21st century. We need citizens who understand how other people live in and interact with the world and care to do something to make it better.

But this isn’t just a charity project or eye-opening experience. I’m not interested in making people take mission trips around America. So let’s look at it from a different angle. Statistically, young adults from low income backgrounds and specifically people of color have fewer job opportunities available to them than their wealthier white peers. This program would be required regardless of if you went to college or graduated high school, regardless of if you have a criminal record or documentation status. It’s a foot in the door for youth in America who are otherwise looking at a minimum wage job at McDonalds. A minimum wage job at McDonalds is fine, but should be one option of many that people can choose to take.

More broadly than impacting young adults in America, I think mandating a year of public service would be a necessary push towards changing what America values. We say we value education, and have one of the worst public education systems in the world. We say we value teachers, and pay them less in one year than we pay (some) entry-level bankers in one month.

Former UN Ambassador Susan Rice said, “I wish we could have mandatory national civilian service in this country, so that every kid… spent six or twelve months in national service, whether it’s laying broadband or building infrastructure, or rehabilitating inner-city schools and libraries. The reason I think service is so important is, not only is it creating economic opportunity in training and skills for those who may not otherwise have them, but most importantly, it’s teaching us to understand and to know each other as Americans across different geographic, racial, socioeconomic lines, as part of one nation and one community.”

Of course there are a lot of finer points that would still need to be tuned about this. What happens if a person can’t get hired anywhere? What about the people who just don’t care, and don’t want to do it? Could volunteering for a year count? What about people who pursue higher education, which in some fields can take up most of your twenties?

I have my own ideas about how to respond to each of these, but I also realize that in doing so I’m making and imposing a lot of my own assumptions about the world on others. Not everyone feels a since of civic duty, or that they “owe” their country anything by performing national service, and I think that’s valid for many marginalized communities that aren’t appreciated by American society. I also respect that my definition of public service might be different than yours; specifically the benefits of military service is something that many people disagree on. Got opinions of your own? I want to hear them.