The problem with Peace Corps is that the 27-month commitment is a major deterrent for young people, particularly since it is fairly inflexible about accommodating grad school plans. And PC is often aimed at somewhat older folks rather than young college graduates whose lives are at a turning point. That's why 12 percent of Ivy League College seniors this year are applying for Teach for America, but only a tiny percent for Peace Corps. I'm all in favor of greater financial support for PC, but that won't meet the needs of a lot of young people who are looking for just a year of overseas service. And I do think it's very important that we find mechanisms to send more young people abroad, embedded in foreign societies.
Nicholas Kristoff writes: Teach for the World Vs. Peace Corps
Teach for the World Vs. Peace Corps
By NICHOLAS KRISTOF
My Thursday column proposing Teach for the World attracted a range of comments and criticisms. One blog noted that the beneficiaries would essentially be American kids and argued that if the aim is to build language and cultural skills, why not do more to expand the Peace Corps? Others noted that if we want to improve education in poor countries, the obvious way to do that is to build local capacity by training teachers - or, I would argue, by deworming kids as has worked so well in Kenya or expanding the conditional cash grants that have been tremendously successful to promote education in Mexico.
All that is true. If we're just trying to promote cost-effective education interventions, then Teach for the World is certainly not one of them. But such a program can help build a constituency for development in the U.S., and that's crucial in the longer run. One reason we don't fund deworming and other programs is because not very many Americans have spent time in Africa or Asia. Aid groups have found that if they can just get an American to pay a visit to a project abroad, that person will then be a donor for life, and we need more Americans with that kind of global background.
There's some analogy with Peace Corps. While Peace Corps volunteers have much more impact on poor countries than Teach for the World volunteers would, it's certainly also true that PC volunteers benefit much more than their communities do from the experience. PC volunteers are transformed, the villages are improved. Peace Corps alumni have had their biggest impact not on foreign villages, but on the American aid community; just this week I spoke at the Center for Global Development, and I was amazed to see how many people in the audience were PC alums. So Teach for the World could expand that constituency for development.
So why not just expand PC, rather than start a new program? The problem with Peace Corps is that the 27-month commitment is a major deterrent for young people, particularly since it is fairly inflexible about accommodating grad school plans. And PC is often aimed at somewhat older folks rather than young college graduates whose lives are at a turning point. That's why 12 percent of Ivy League College seniors this year are applying for Teach for America, but only a tiny percent for Peace Corps. I'm all in favor of greater financial support for PC, but that won't meet the needs of a lot of young people who are looking for just a year of overseas service. And I do think it's very important that we find mechanisms to send more young people abroad, embedded in foreign societies.
Another approach would be to provide more government support for WorldTeach, which as a privately run organization has a lower cost structure than Peace Corps. And colleges can certainly do better about encouraging young people to study abroad, and encouraging them to take gap years before college. Graduate schools can make clear that they welcome foreign experience on a resume (other than building homes for a month in a country with great beaches).
The other day I was interviewed by a high school student whose own trajectory underscores the power of the kind of foreign experience that I'd like to see more of. Eliza Erle spent a summer in an AIDS orphanage in South Africa in 2008, and I'm sure she did some good work. But as she's the first to acknowledge, she was by far the biggest beneficiary of the program. So on her return she started raising money for the orphanage, with some $15,000 raised so far. And she now has an interest in development that truly may benefit many, many other people over her career. That's the kind of life-altering experience that I'd like to see Teach for the World offer to thousands of Americans each year, for the good of America and the world.
