Public Service Academies

A panel debate over the need for a U.S. Public Service Academy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on Wednesday left some wondering whether its benefits would be worth its costs.
“It’s got great potential, but it definitely needs more support from Congress, and taxpayers might have a problem with it,” said Brianne Aderly, a member of the non-profit group City Year, who came to watch the debate.

The Public Service Academy is the brainchild of Chris Meyers Asch, 33. A Teach for America veteran who co-founded the project, Asch wants to make the college a counterpart to America’s military academies by providing 5,000 undergraduate students with training in public rather than military service. Tuition for students would be free for the liberal arts degree in exchange that students serve five years where they are needed in the public sector after graduating.

Asch advocated the growing need for such an institution with baby boomers soon retiring and crises like Hurricane Katrina showing a need to improve public service leadership. As the number of college graduates entering into public service has dropped in the past 25 years, Asch believes an academy could change the way young people view a career in the public sector.

“There is a desire among young people to serve,” Asch said. “[They] don’t think the public sector is where you go to make a difference. This is a way to combat that culture.”

He calculated that the university would cost $205 million annually; roughly $40,000 per student.
“Yes, it’s expensive,” Asch said, “but this is going to change this nation.”

Others were not so optimistic.
“This is a bad idea, terribly well advocated,” said Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University.

Trachtenberg and Philip I. Levy, former member of the Secretary of State’s policy planning staff, acknowledged the problems that Asch addressed, but do not believe that building an academy is the right solution. Trachtenberg argued that the government should make public service more attractive rather than spend money on a new university. He worried also that an academy would upset the current bureaucratic merit system for promotion, creating an “un-republican effect” on civil service, and that, like the military, most graduates would leave the public sector once their five years of service were finished.

“It would be cheaper and just as effective to build an ROTC-like program,” Trachtenberg said.

A university for public service is not an original concept. According to Frederick Hess, a resident scholar at AEI, supporters of such an academy have spanned from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Andrew Carnegie. More recently, in the late 1980s, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker developed a similar idea for a commission on public service. Previous proposals accomplished little, however, and Asch is well aware of the considerable challenges his own will face.

“People ask me all the time, ‘If George Washington couldn’t do it – Well, who do you think you are?” Asch said, jokingly, “We are definitely going in with our eyes open.”

Amanda Busse is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.