AGA Today
Graduating to Public
Service
By Stephen Barr
The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 13, 2007; D04
In hopes of
encouraging more college students to consider careers in government,
leaders at 27 universities are trading ideas and techniques on what it
will take to bring a new generation into public service.
The forecast is
troublesome. Hundreds of thousands of baby boomers will be retiring from
the government in the next few years, but most college students know
little about federal jobs and how to apply for them.
The college
leaders gathered last week at Princeton University for a discussion on
the future of the government and how to create a national movement to
champion scholarship and fellowship programs that will attract top
students to public service.
"Our research
is pretty clear. Public service is not on the radar screen of most
students," said Max Stier, president of the nonprofit Partnership for
Public Service.
Anne-Marie
Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International
Affairs at Princeton, added, "The kids who want to be change agents and
make the biggest impact do not see the federal government as the place
to do that."
The Partnership
for Public Service and the Woodrow Wilson school sponsored the forum to
hear from students, deans and financial donors. Participants explored
ways to create new and specialized fellowships that would show students
that the government has its share of cutting-edge programs and help them
avoid excessive educational debt as they prepare for federal service.
A number of
colleges have programs in place that could serve as models, Stier said.
They include Princeton's Scholars in the Nation's Service initiative,
which began in 2006; the Samuel J. Heyman fellowships at the Harvard Law
School, started in 2000; and the Robert B. Fiske Jr. fellowships at the
University of Michigan Law School, started in 2001.
The Princeton
initiative, for example, includes a summer internship with the federal
government, two years working in a federal agency, and a master's degree
in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson school. Heyman, who founded
the Partnership for Public Service, and Fiske, a former U.S. attorney in
New York, provide honorariums and student loan repayments for students
going into the federal government.
Other programs
that encourage federal service have been launched by the University of
Maryland, Seton Hall Law School and Tufts University. Louisiana State
University, Stanford University and others are considering such
programs.
Participants at
the Princeton forum included Shirley M. Tilghman, president of
Princeton; Walter D. Broadnax, president of Clark Atlanta University;
David T. Ellwood, dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of
Government; Selma Botman, executive vice president of the City
University of New York; Astrid E. Merget, provost of LSU; T. Alexander
Aleinikoff, dean of the Georgetown University law school; Robert
Hollister, dean of Tufts' college of citizenship and public service; and
Jeffrey Wachtel, chief of staff to the president at Stanford.
While the forum
participants agreed they need to better inform students about
opportunities in government and help them pay for their educations,
Stier said the university leaders also think the government has to speed
up hiring and become more competitive with the private sector.
"They were
quite clear that they could not do it on their own, that the government
had to help itself," Stier said.
Retirement's
Next Wave
The Office of
Personnel Management projects that about 60 percent of federal employees
will become eligible to retire in the next decade. But it's not clear
that all agencies are planning for the day when they might be short of
experienced hands, according to a survey released yesterday.
Only 39 percent
of the 171 federal managers in the survey said their agency had a policy
for "knowledge management," the formal and informal ways that
organizations pass along information, procedures and practices so that
employees know how to get their jobs done. The rest were unsure or did
not know if their agencies had such a policy.
The survey was
sponsored by Tandberg, a firm that makes software for video, voice and
other data.
Rep. Danny K.
Davis (D-Ill.), chairman of the House federal workforce subcommittee,
said if agencies stumble in transferring knowledge to newly hired
employees, "then there could be a downturn in productivity" across
government. Agencies need to ensure that their new employees are
properly trained, he said.