Forcing Community Service by College Students Would Be Mistake

SACRAMENTO —  Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is asking for “the people’s input” concerning a massive plan he commissioned to overhaul state government. So here’s my input: Stop picking on college students.

Stop using them as piggy banks for budget-balancing -- especially when rich folks aren’t being asked to pay anything extra -- and don’t use the students now as guinea pigs for some elitist social engineering.

Leafing through the 5 1/2 -inch thick catalog of 1,000-plus proposals presented to the governor Tuesday by a state study group, one suggestion particularly caused me to wince -- an idea inspired by Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver.

Shriver’s life is rooted in volunteerism. Her father, Sargent Shriver, was the first director of the Peace Corps. Her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, created the Special Olympics. Maria Shriver gave a motivational talk to the state study team about the merits of volunteerism. And some staffers then came up with a proposal to require community service as a condition for receiving a “degree or certificate” from any public university or college in California.

Not voluntary, like the Peace Corps. Mandatory community service, like sentencing for some convicted criminal.

OK, they’d only be required to perform 16 hours of community service -- maybe for two Saturdays, sometime before graduation. But it’s the “you owe us” attitude of the report -- called the California Performance Review -- that really grates.

“California taxpayers subsidize the education of students,” the CPR report states.

“In exchange for the significant investment of taxpayer funds in their education and their future, students attending the state’s public colleges and universities should be required to perform a minimum amount of community service. This service requirement will benefit the students, their community and the overall well-being of California and its people....

“The first goal is to draw students into a participatory citizenry, to recognize their efforts and to build their sense of membership within California’s global society. The second intent ... is to create a societal expectation that each individual has a responsibility to acknowledge the benefits provided them by society [and] accept responsibility to participate in the betterment of society and not rely exclusively on governmental institutions.”

Reads like a mix of Soviet bloc big-brotherism, Jesuit philosophy and Heritage Foundation ramblings.

Look, taxpayers don’t “subsidize” students as much as they invest in California’s own future by providing affordable educations that develop a skilled, innovative workforce. It’s one of the things that made California great. Weather alone didn’t do it.

Our public universities used to be a lot more accessible and affordable. This year Schwarzenegger denied admission to thousands of qualified high school graduates, but backed away from rejecting even more when pressured by Democratic legislators. Annual student fees were hiked to $780 at community colleges, $2,334 at state universities and $5,684 for University of California undergrads.

The CPR staffers also see the mandatory community service as a moneymaker, “worth approximately $192 million” in free labor.

Community service is terrific, of course. It just should be voluntary. But if it is to be mandatory, it should be imposed on everybody, not just students attending public colleges. We should be encouraging their attendance, not penalizing it.

There’s a good argument for requiring national public service, but that’s a policy question for the president and Congress.

It’s one thing for a kid with wealthy parents and free time to be ordered into community service. It’s another to force some 28-year-old, return-to-college waitress with a kid at home to devote any time at all to this feel-good, ivory tower concept. The average age of community college students, incidentally, is 28.

And regarding community colleges, their leadership got smacked by the study group. It recommended that the independent Community College Board of Governors be eliminated and the entire 107-campus system be overseen by the governor’s office. In the current case, that would mean Schwarzenegger’s education advisor, former L.A. Mayor Richard Riordan.

This smacks of a power grab and an effort to shut up dissident voices at budget time.

In accepting the restructuring report -- to personally read and send to a separate review commission -- Schwarzenegger complained about “the special interests that will be screaming, that will be complaining and ... squawking about the recommendations, calling them unfair and impractical or maybe even worse.”

Schwarzenegger is a showman who tends toward excessive hyperbole. I doubt he really regards college students who are just scraping by as special interests. He may, however, consider community colleges as special interests when they disagree with him. That seems to be his definition of a special interest.

My input: Leave the community colleges alone. Leave the college kids alone. Enhance and encourage community service that’s voluntary.

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George Skelton writes Monday and Thursday. Reach him at george.skelton@latimes.com.