A College Alternative
For as long as I can remember, I have been hearing people complain about the following problems in the United States:
(1) College isn’t working for lots of people. The college experience is supposed to be great. Make lifelong friends, have fun. Learn useful intangibles, like how to be independent and problem solve. Pick up skills that will help you find a job and thrive in it. But I hear that today’s version of college isn’t working for many young people (at least in the United States).
You spend your first couple of years learning things that are not very useful, especially when you choose a major that’s non-technical in nature. Degrees feel less valuable when you enter the workforce. Companies mostly care about if you can do the work, and college seems increasingly like a less useful way to learn how to do the work. Also, college is too expensive. “The campus experience” is not, for most people, worth taking out $100,000s worth in debt.
(2) The U.S. needs better public infrastructure. Why do so few cities have functional public transit systems? Where is all the high-speed rail? Why are roads in some places consistently filled with potholes? Isn’t this supposed to be the “richest country on earth?” You couldn’t tell by looking at the public infrastructure.
(3) People are worried that the younger generations are not resilient enough. There are concerns that TikTok is rotting brains. I hear that young people are too entitled. Critical thinking seems like it might be reaching new lows. This, if true, also seems concerning.
I am tired of hearing about all of these problems with no viable solutions. So here’s a totally real proposal for a solution that you should take very seriously.
We should institute mandatory military service. Except without the military.
Instead of going off to a war to kill people, you are drafted to work effectively as a tradesperson (manual labor, for most people) for whatever infrastructure project the government wants to put you on. High-speed rail. Residential construction. Fixing potholes in a suburb of Detroit. Whatever.
This would kick in when you turn 18 and would last until your 20th birthday. Just two years. That’s it.
Everyone has to do this, by the way. Everyone. No draft dodging for rich people or talented athletes. You’re working 8 hours a day, in the heat often, learning how to struggle and solve problems. And probably some of the people would be building useful skills in the trades; you would be assigned to work on things that the people running these projects believe you would be good at. Like in the military.
It wouldn’t be all suffering. The housing is free. The food is free. You get some kind of monthly allowance for entertainment and so on (standard practice in countries with conscription, like Denmark and Taiwan). There are still frats, campuses, intramural sports, and clubs. It’s still like college, kind of.
Oh, and maybe you get to skip the line at the airport. Maybe after the military veterans.
We could even enhance it further. The government could buy all the Amex lounges from Amex and make it a perk. Something ridiculous like that. Maybe there’s a 10% discount at grocery stores, like seniors often get? Or maybe it’s 5%?
You may notice that this idea is a bit half-baked. Sure, there are ways to modify it:
- Pay people minimum wage
- Don’t make it mandatory; maybe it’s a tool if you want to reduce your loans or if college does not appeal to you
- Figure out how much extra labor the U.S. could actually use and only accept that number of people each year
This sounds a little insane, I get it. Maybe your internal alarm bells are saying: “Wait, this isn’t possible! The logistics are too hard!”
But is it actually too hard? They did something similar with the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the Great Depression and that went pretty well (depending on who you ask). I would like to believe that, almost 100 years later, we could do something even more ambitious and pull it off even more effectively.
If every single 18 to 20 year old was in this program today, that might look like a free $500B to $1T in annual labor value alone (13M x 50,000+ or so). It’s not that all public infrastructure would magically be free, but labor is often 40%-plus of construction costs. We could get way more built, way faster.
And maybe the kids would be better off as a result?
Feel free to email us with all of the reasons this would (or would not) work.
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