The AmeriCorps program, which enables Americans to perform domestic national service in exchange for aid to pay for college or graduate school, is one of the great public policy success stories of the last few decades.

AmeriCorps has consistently promoted personal responsibility, expanded educational opportunity, and strengthened the nation’s bonds of community - all the while filling vital societal needs. Since the program was launched in 1994, it has engaged more than 500,000 Americans in more than 637 million hours of service to local communities nationwide. Program participants have effectively tutored in schools, fought forest fires, immunized children, responded to natural disasters, and conducted community anti-crime patrols.

The nonpartisan organization that I run, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, sponsors two different AmeriCorps teams that aid local soup kitchens and food pantries. Hungry New Yorkers benefit greatly from the idealism, energy, and street-smarts of the people who serve in our AmeriCorps programs.

The next President should dramatically expand AmeriCorps. The program now engages roughly 70,000 full and part-time participants a year. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the approximately 1.4 million Amerians who serve in the armed forces and the more than four million people who graduate from high school in the U.S. each year.

AmeriCorps should be large enough so that that service to the country - whether civilian or military - could be an option for all Americans willing to serve. Therefore, the next President should propose a plan that would, over the next decade, ramp-up AmeriCorps to a program ten times its current size, using that long planning time to ensure that all the projects in the larger program will still fill crucial community needs.

In the meantime, one easy and affordable step the nation can take to prove we value national service is to restore the purchasing power of the educational award for AmeriCorps participants. The relative worth of the award has decreased so greatly since the program’s start that two of the most important original goals of AmeriCorps - helping Americans afford post-secondary education and bringing together people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds - are both at risk.

When the DLC first proposed the general idea of tying national service to student aid in 1988, the plan was to provide an educational award of $10,000 per year for each year of civilian service. At that time, that would have equaled 26% of the costs for four years at an average private college and 131% of the costs for four years at an average public college. In other words, under the original DLC proposal, the educational award earned through a year of service would have enabled someone to pay for their entire undergraduate degree at a public institution and still have a significant sum left over for graduate school.

By the time AmeriCorps was formally launched in 1994, due to fierce Congressional opposition and budget realities, the educational award was set by the legislation at only $4,725 for each year of service. That amount then paid for about 11% of the costs for four years at an average private college and 47% of the costs at an average public college.

Today - 13 years later - because the educational award stayed the same while private and public college costs skyrocketed far faster than the rate of inflation - an AmeriCorps educational award now pays for only 5% of a four-year private education and only 21% of a four-year public education. To make matters even worse, the AmeriCorps educational award - unlike many forms of federal student aid - is taxable, so its buying power is often even less.

The sad truth is that the average liberal arts graduate (who now earns an average of $31,333 in the first year out of college) would actually save more money to pay back old loans and/or to pay for graduate school by working in a regular job than he or she would by serving in AmeriCorps.

Serving in AmeriCorps still builds an ethic of service, provides real-life work experiences, and gives idealistic Americans a much-needed outlet for serving their country. Those are all vital reasons to serve. But as a purely economic matter, it is now a horrible deal. It is no wonder that is becoming increasingly difficult for AmeriCorps program sponsors such as my organization to recruit teams of participants that are socio-economically diverse.

To counter these trends, the President and Congress should immediately increase the educational award to $10,000 for each year of full-time service, which, at current enrollment levels, would cost the federal government less than $200 million extra per year. Given the clear economic benefits of expanding access to higher education, this additional spending would be an extremely cost-effective investment in the nation’s future. We should also stop taxing these awards and index their future levels to the rate of inflation.

Some public and private colleges match AmeriCorps educational awards with their own funding. National leaders should urge more private colleges to so, and state and local elected officials should appropriate funding to enable public institutions to do so.

Taken together, these relatively modest steps would reinvigorate the original civic compact promised by AmeriCorps - a mutually beneficial deal in which both the nation and the participants gain.

These steps would also provide a down payment on achieving the long-term goal of expanding AmeriCorps so greatly that a year of voluntary civilian or military service would become a standard rite of passage for young Americans. As Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “Anyone can be great because anyone can serve.” It’s time to give all Americans the opportunity to achieve their greatness through service.

This entry was posted on 10.09.2007 at 8:35 am and is filed under Economic Opportunity, Helping Families, Ending Poverty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.