American Service Learning Academy is Bad Idea

Last month, bills were introduced into both houses of Congress that would create an American Public Service Academy. According to USpublicserviceacademy.org, the purpose of such an institution would be to produce graduates committed to a life of public service and would be modeled after the US military academies, such as West Point.

Senator Hillary Clinton, the main proponent of the bill in the Senate had this to say:
"We are facing ... the impending retirement of so many of the senior ranks of our government. The people who do everything from help predict the weather, to run our nuclear power plants, to figure out how the Social Security system will keep functioning ... we're concerned that we're not going to have the workforce that we need in the next 10 years to keep this complicated government functioning."

Applicants for the Academy would have to acquire the recommendation of their congressperson and would be required to serve the government for five years after graduation. According to the same website, the Academy would cost at least $205,000,000 a year to run and operate for about 5,000 students.

While the idea of a national academy dedicated to public service is honorable and seems sensible at first hearing it, such an institution is both unnecessary and unwise.

According to the same website, which is the main proponent behind this idea, “The cost of pursuing public service careers (as opposed to just one or two years) after graduation can be prohibitive because college tuition has increased dramatically in the past decade – according to the Project on Student Debt, the average college graduate owes about $20,000, an increase of more than 50% in the past decade. With so much debt, students often must give up their dreams of public service careers in favor of more lucrative fields.”

While there is no doubt that more students are taking on more college debt, it would be foolish to create an entirely new university to alleviate this problem, mainly because it would have no real impact. While there were no statistics as to how much it would cost per student per year for taxpayers to support this new initiative, it is probably safe to assume it costs at least $20,000 a year/student. That would mean that a four year education would cost at least $80,000, or $60,000 more than an average college graduates debt.

If there is truly a public-servant deficit, it would make much more sense financially for the government to simply pay off the debt of college graduates in return for service. Better yet, the government could take the $205,000,000 it would cost to run the academy per year and subsidize more student loans, thusly lessening the debt burden on students and, according to the logic of USpublicserviceacademy.org, making more college graduates more likely to make a career of public service.

It seems a bit amusing that Senator Clinton is worried about running a “complicated government” in the future, but her answer to this is not to make government less complicated, but more so. Instead of lessening the size and scope of government, which would in turn make it less complicated, Clinton feels it necessary to create an entirely new university with graduates specifically trained in how to deal with this complexity. Senator Clinton’s answer to a bureaucratic mess: more bureaucracy.

While an American Public Service Academy would be financially unwise, it would also be rather un-American. If there is one thing we can gleam from our Founding Fathers, it is that public service is an honor and a privilege, and should not be a career. Let us consider a prime example: George Washington.

The former president was a farmer turned military leader who would deny the kingship of our new country and later limit himself to two terms as president. Instead of carrying on as president indefinitely, Washington decided to retire back to his Virginian farm. He put his time in, and then left. This would hold true until President Franklin Roosevelt, who would win four terms in the White House and had committed most of his life to public service as Governor of New York and in other elected positions.

The American public is not served well by elected officials who know nothing but government. Such people, like Senator Clinton, inevitably come up with the same answer for society’s and government’s problems: more government. Unfortunately, government is more often the cause of problems than the solution. If Social Security is too complicated for Senator Clinton and others to understand, we do not need to create a college to study it, but rather reduce its complexity.

If there is an actual shortage of government workers, we should lessen the size of government, not increase the amount of employees at a cost to the American tax payers. The answer to government problems should not be more government, but less.