Mandatory Service

As high schools in the United States increasingly require volunteering or some service for graduation, a debate has emerged about whether this is actually volunteering and whether it is beneficial to students.

Some have looked beyond this debate, however, and started advocating for a formal mandatory service program on the national level. The basic idea is this: at some point after high school, every American young adult must complete a year of national service. It can be in the military, teaching, working with the poor, or some other form of community service. And the federal government would pay for it.

Some argue that this type of program is too expensive for undetermined results. But while it is certainly expensive, the results are almost always positive. Talk with anyone who was formerly in a position performing national service, and almost to a person they report that the experience had a positive impact on them and forced them to be more civically engaged later in life.

In 2010, the US Census Bureau estimates that the US population will be 310,232,863 people. The percentage of that population that is between the ages of 0 and 19 is 27.4%, or 85,003,804 total people. Assuming the federal government pays each of those people $25,000 (which includes salary and all benefits) for one year of service, the total cost for twenty years of civically minded young adults contributing to the nation is $2,125,095,100,000. This is absolutely a lot of money, even when spread over 20 years. And it is a hard decision to commit to that much money.

But had we made this hard decision twenty years ago, there would be more volunteers in inner cities working with economically blighted areas. There would be more campgrounds cleared on federal land. There would be a larger and deeper respect for the military, as more of our children would have joined and the burdens of military families would be more widely shared. In short, there would be more of many things that we want more of. A hard decision to pay for mandatory national service would have led to a better country today.