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147873617
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Service Organizations: Progressive Policy Institute (Will Marshall)
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147873617
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Service Organizations: Progressive Policy Institute (Will Marshall)
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Records of the Office of National Service (Clinton Administration)
Eli Segal's Files
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FOIA Number: 2013-0661-F
FOIA
MARKER
This is not a textual record. This is used as an
administrative marker by the William J. Clinton
Presidential Library Staff.
Collection/Record Group:
Clinton Presidential Records
Subgroup/Office of Origin:
National Service
Series/Staff Member:
Eli Segal
Subseries:
OA/ID Number:
1295
FolderID:
Folder Title:
Service Organizations: Progressive Policy Institute (Will Marshall)
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S
66
2
8
1
P01
-03-04-93 07:27PM
File
Progressive
POLICY INSTITUTE
To:
Eli Segal
From:
Will Marshall
Re:
National Service
Date:
March 4, 1993
Congratulations on the successful launching of the President's national service
initiative. Perhaps more than any other of his innovations, national service has the
potential to change the nation's ethos -- to replace a politics of one-way entitlement
with a new politics of reciprocal responsibility. It could become the most distinctive
and enduring legacy of the Clinton presidency.
Having thought and written a lot about national service over the last seven
years, I'd like to raise two issues for your consideration as you refine the initial
proposal. The first concerns the question of who should serve; the second has to do
with the relationship between how the system is structured and how it is perceived
by the public.
The question of who should serve has powerful implications for the scope, cost
and civic character of the enterprise. Those of us involved in crafting the DLC/Nunn-
McCurdy approach are convinced that national service would be of particular benefit
to high school graduates. We're concerned that the program as described creates a
bias in favor of post-college service by making the rewards greater than for pre-
college service.
There are some compelling arguments for pre-college service:
Much of the work that national servers could do is labor-intensive and does
not require a college degree. A Ford Foundation study identified 3.5 million potential
national service slots in schools, hospitals, clinics, shelters, day care centers and
conservation work. Most of the jobs are low-skill or menial and could easily be
performed by high school graduates.
The "opportunity costs" to our economy are lower. If a college graduate
delays entry into private labor markets in order to perform national service, society
loses the (private) value of his or her labor for a year. Opportunity costs for high
school graduates are lower as their productivity is lower.
* High school-age youths may need national service the most. Many need the
experience and maturity of serving before they venture into college or the job market.
American University President Joe Duffy estimates that about 40 percent of the
freshmen he sees are emotionally unprepared to take advantage of college. (I dropped
316 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Suite 555, Washington, D.C. 20003 202/547-0001 Fax 202/347-0099
103-04-93 07:24PM
P03
out after the first year and went to work in a boat factory). National service is more
than a college-funding scheme; as William James argued, it should also be a rite of
civic passage for young people taking their first step toward adulthood and
independent citizenship. Moreover, the experience of City Year and other service
programs shows that service often motivates kids who otherwise lacked the self-
confidence to go to college. This is especially true when disadvantaged kids are
thrown together with middle class kids.
* Living expenses are cheaper. Because they can live at home while serving,
high school age volunteers don't need a big living stipend and are less likely to need
ancillary benefits like child care. The overall compensation package is greater for
college graduates, who have to support themselves as well as pay off their student
loans.
* Job displacement is less likely. Labor worries that a large-scale national
service system inevitably will displace public and private workers. The key, again,
is to target labor-intensive tasks that don't require college training and that
otherwise would not be done by either government or the private sector.
*
The stress on post-college work suggests that national service is really for
college students. There is a striking disparity between the various benefits and
subsidies governments offer to the college bound and the meager help vocational
education programs of dubious worth -- given to the "forgotten half" that don't go to
college. That's why we've always insisted that non-college kids could use their
national service reward for job training and other purposes. (The best idea is probably
to use the reward to subsidize wages, thus giving employers an incentive to hire
national service veterans.)
If national service is to grow and eventually become a common civic experience
for large numbers of citizens, it must welcome college and non-college youth.
Moreover, tilting the system toward college graduates will make it harder to achieve
racial, ethnic and class diversity in national service.
Lastly. encouraging young people to do service before they get the reward
underscores the idea that national service is about earned benefits, not entitlements.
I think this idea of earning your way and contributing to your own education is key
to the tremendous public appeal of national service. Many families would rather not
borrow at all for college if they don't have to. And the prospect of heavy borrowing
for college is daunting to families struggling on the economic margins.
For all these reasons, I'd recommend that the educational benefit be equal for
pre-college and post-college servers. The argument that post-college servers should
get more because they do more valuable work misses the point. That differential
should be reflected in the stipend or hourly wage, not in the educational benefit.
After all, national service is not just a jobs program; the educational benefit should
reflect the real costs of post-secondary schooling, not the actual market value of the
03-04-93 07:24PM
P04
work performed by servers.
Incidentally, a 1973 community service experiment in Seattle that involved
people aged 18-25 showed that the 18-20 year olds were more likely to volunteer than
the older participants. Don Eberle of the National Service Secretariat, who has been
at this longer than anyone, can tell you more about this. I know he would like to talk
to you. His number is (202) 244-5828.
The second point concerns the program architecture. I agree that the federal
government should be seen as an investor in national service, not as the organizer
of the enterprise. The states obviously will have to play a key role if they are going
to pick up part of the costs. The question, however, is this: can national service be
viable over the long haul without local leadership and a strong sense of community
ownership? I'm not sure you get those without some mechanism for engaging the
larger community in the enterprise.
The great danger is that national service could become stigmatized as a federal
make-work jobs program like CETA. CETA started as a training program, but
became a jobs program when President Carter pumped $7 billion into it. By building
up gradually, President Clinton has wisely avoided generating a bow wave of federal
funding that will set off scrambling to create lots of public service jobs quickly. But
unless there is broad community leadership in identifying what kinds of tasks really
need to be performed, and in getting public institutions and non-profits together to
create service opportunities that everyone agrees are worthwhile -- in short, unless
communities feel they own the enterprise rather than having it imposed on them
from above -- then national service could lose local support.
I'm not sure what form community leadership should take. One possibility is
to look for existing structures or networks that can be adapted to this purpose. For
example, most cities have a Leadership (name the city) organization, which each year
recruits a "class" of civic leaders, competitively chosen, to grapple with the city's
needs. It has a kind of trade association: the National Association of Community
Leadership Organizations Alumni of these groups often form the Volunteer Centers
that are overseen by the Points of Lights Foundation. I'm not an expert on these
groups; the point is simply to underscore the need for a sense of community
ownership and pride in the local national service efforts.
I hope these thoughts are useful. Again, national service is off to a terrific
start and if I can be of help in settling some of these critical design issues, please let
me know.
CC: Bill Galston
Jeck - Ed Kilgure 5011 Nune steemed