GU students must answer call to implement national service year

Joining the armed forces is often considered the pinnacle of service to one’s country. It was therefore heartening to see retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal advocate for an “appropriately voluntary but socially expected” national year of service by all American citizens aged 18-28 in the pages of the Washington Post on Friday.

National service takes many forms, from AmeriCorps participation to teaching, hospice care, and conservation work. This Editorial Board echoes McChrystal’s mandate that service become a defining issue of the 2016 election, and that citizens who serve receive a stipend, course credit, and skills for future employment. Volunteers from all socioeconomic backgrounds could alleviate many of America’s most pressing issues, from failing infrastructure and underachieving schools to declining civic solidarity and patriotism.

But McChrystal’s vision will only be realized if young people—high school graduates and college students especially—validate the legitimacy of service as a valuable endeavor. Perhaps nowhere is concern for one’s future career more evident than at Georgetown, where students crossing campus wearing suits to Capitol Hill internships or preparing for their Wall Street interviews are the norm.

Too often, however, the definition of a respectable career is limited to the lucrative or prestigious. The very narrative of success in this country is counterproductively skewed toward titles and ladder-climbing—a status quo that must be revised if national service is to be taken seriously. As students, we must acknowledge and embody the ideal of service as a necessary and desirable calling.

The positive impact of national service underscores this necessity. Whether measured by the declining dropout rate in U.S. schools or the demonstrated fiscal and social benefits of federally subsidized service programs like AmeriCorps, its effectiveness is beyond dispute.

And while Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has repeatedly called for the removal of all funding from AmeriCorps—which has fielded over 800,000 corps members since its inception under the Clinton administration—service need not be a partisan issue. Mitt Romney, who picked Ryan as his running-mate in the 2012 presidential election, helped fund City Year, an AmeriCorps program that partners with underperforming schools, in the early 1980s, sat on its board, and defended it against Republican budget cuts alongside President Clinton in 1995.

But national service will forever fend off naysayers until a deliberate effort is made to realize it. Young people must lead this charge, both as beneficiaries of the skills and opportunities that service entails as well as to philanthropically better the country they will inherit. Service raises awareness about national issues and, more importantly, actualizes solutions. Just weeks after Millennial midterm voter turnout remained disappointingly low, galvanizing young people to become informed, engaged, civic-minded, and solutions-oriented voters is an investment in our nation’s future.

Georgetown students—many already possessing those qualities—and students nationwide should lobby their state legislatures and Congressional representatives to increase funding for national service programs. They also should lead by example, taking a year of service before enrolling or after graduating in order to truly enshrine this ideal among our national priorities governing how Americans can and must give back to benefit all.