Bold Little Swallow

On Change.gov (President-Elect Obama’s website), there’s a fabulous place to offer your ideas.  So I offered mine, which I am also putting here for the record (though I put in links where, obviously, I did not in the text box to Obama because they should know their website enough to know what I’m referring to).

You should offer your ideas too.

Here’s what I wrote:

I would like to respond to your America Serves page/initiative ideas.  First of all, it’s so fabulous that these plans is in the works, especially for young people (teenagers and 20-somethings).  As a 22 year old who has recently graduated college and focused in secondary level education as an educational concentration and career path, I’ve witnessed two major issues with young people: one is railroading recent high school graduates into college (who may or may not be ready for college due to education or maturity) without seeing many prospects for alternative experiences before or instead of college.  The other is few opportunities or encouragement for young people to become engaged in their communities.  Society values getting rich quick more than community engagement/service and holistic education.  This is unhealthy both for individuals and for society as a whole, and I think that creating more opportunities and transparent systems for service work will be very beneficial to everyone involved.

However, one thing concerned me: the required number of community service hours for college students.  I personally graduated from a college that had a community service requirement, but there are two things that make this work: the definition of community service and what that opportunity could be for a specific student was left to that student and his/her academic advisor alone to negotiate (which would not be so easily possible in a standard nation-wide requirement), and also there is no set number of required hours.  Furthermore, the community service requirement is something completed sometime over the course of one’s second and third years in college (making the timeline more flexible), and while some students do a significant amount of community service during their time at the school (and probably would do the same without a specific requirement), most students do not do such substantial amounts of community service as 100 hours.

The requirement of 100 hours a year is huge.  If my math is correct, that equates to about a course a semester, in addition to their college or university’s requirements.  While more time outside of the classroom and engaging with the non-academic world would undoubtedly be a positive change for college students and academia, many students are burdened not only with a rigorous academic program, but also jobs of all esteems, both during the academic year and more intensively in the summer.  To imagine they must also tackle a significant community service requirement when they are barely able to fit in time to work so that they may afford the education they are completing — it’s frankly unfair.  As this website indicates on the page about the economy, college tuition is rising, and loans are not only harder to get than previously but also a huge burden on a recently-graduated college student looking for work in a depressed economy.

Please consider revising your proposal by lowering the required number of hours, making the timeframe more flexible (perhaps over the course of one’s undergraduate education rather than within one year), and including scholarship assistance to those needing to fund their college education in addition to a community service requirement.

Also, thank you for providing this system for easily submitting ideas.