An idea dating from 1789 has recently been resurrected – the creation of a national university for the United States. George Washington proposed exactly that in his first inaugural address and two young idealists have now set up an organization that will push for the creation of such a university.
Writing in the June 16th Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), Chris Myers Asch, chairman of the Campaign for a U.S. Service Academy argues that the U.S. needs to have a national university “designed to cultivate a steady flow of first-rate young leaders dedicated to civic leadership.” (Another article on the subject is available here.) Asch and Shawn Raymond, both of whom taught in the Teach for America program and subsequently founded a non-profit group to provide after-school tutoring to low-income students, are promoting the establishment of a United States Public Service Academy because they think it’s time to “tap into a renewed sense of patriotism and civic obligation among young people.”
Whether there actually is any such renewed sense is questionable, but let’s look at the arguments Asch makes in favor of his proposal.
A key contention he makes is that most American students “are woefully unprepared when it comes to global education, and they often graduate from college without knowing a foreign language or having any experience abroad.” Quite true, but I doubt that either having studied a foreign language or having spent some time in another country is necessary to being a capable “civic leader.”
Asch presses ahead, writing that our ignorance of the world and monolingualism is a great national weakness. Most Americans, however, don’t need to have in-depth knowledge of international affairs and languages other than English. Some do, but people who want to go into fields that call for such expertise can and do develop it on the job. The notion that we need to have a large cadre of young people who can rely on their college learning to help the U.S. in its global problems is pretty hard to accept. Analogously, most law students don’t take any trial practice work while in law school, but that doesn’t matter. The small number who decide to go into trial work learn what they need to later on. I think that Asch is putting too much value on students’ college years, a time when most aren’t particularly serious anyway.
The curriculum for the proposed school would be primarily devoted to the liberal arts, but with several unique requirements. Students would have to spend time studying abroad, learning “emergency-response planning,” and completing internships with charitable groups and with the military. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but I think it’s fanciful to believe that a bit of exposure to a foreign society, to dealing with emergencies, working for a time with a charitable organization and having some contact with the military is necessarily going to make one a better civic leader.
Students for the national university would be chosen in the same way as are students for the military academies – by congressional nomination, with two places for each electoral vote a state has. There would also be room for some international students and nominations from the executive branch. In all, the incoming class each year would have around 1,275 students. They would not pay any tuition, but upon graduation would be obligated to work for at least five years in some government capacity.
The tuition-free aspect of the proposal is one of Asch’s main selling points. He contends that “many students must abandon their dreams of giving back to their country because their college-loan burdens price them out of public-service careers.”
Is that true? Most public-sector jobs pay at least as well as comparable private-sector work, and frequently with greater job security and benefits. Government agencies hardly ever experience difficulty in attracting qualified applicants. Furthermore, as the recent study by The College Board found and the Pope Center wrote about, few college graduates have difficulty in managing their student loans. While it’s no doubt true that a few students who have borrowed very heavily feel that they have to shoot for top salaries on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, that number is probably very small. In any case, with numerous competent people looking for government employment, it’s hard to see that we face a real problem.
How much would it cost? Asch calculates the annual operating cost at $205 million. Building the campus (which he’d like to see in Washington, D.C., where land is scarce and construction very costly) would undoubtedly cost hundreds of millions more.
Asch maintains that his proposed university “would unify graduates with a shared sense of mission,” but why should we suppose that to be true? The most obvious sort of student who would want to attend is one who is already attracted to working for the government in some respect and finds the free tuition appealing. Will all the curricular stuff about studying abroad, emergency planning, and internships really make a big difference in how those people would approach their work?
Color me skeptical – about the whole idea.