By providing a post-service benefit, national service members can ease their student debt, or accrue savings that will help them go to school. It is not an entitlement, and it is not a hand out.

Educational benefits are linked to work service. Participants are eligible only when they have finished their work service commitment.

The second problem national service is designed to address is more idealistic. It is how to instill in young Americans what de Tocqueville called the habits of the heart. To address the sharp drop over the last two decades in the number of Americans who volunteer in their own communities, a fact representative of Americans disinvesting in those social institutions which helped build our country.

Bob Putnam, a Professor at Harvard, has written an article called `Bowling Alone.' He says more people bowl today than a decade ago but few belong to bowling leagues. So, Senator Mikulski, what does that have to do with national service?

The point is bowling alone is a metaphor for the way Americans have come to view civic involvement and citizenship. There has a been an absolute decline in developing community involvement. People have less time available because many households have two wage earners instead of one. They are more mobile. We have a society that is more influenced by TV. And they are also less committed. There is a serious lack of a sense of civic obligation.

Fewer people attend PTA, groups like Red Cross and the Boy Scouts have fewer volunteers.

My point in saying this is that national service is an idea that promotes exactly the values that the Republican leader wishes to instill. The fact that we should not rely on Government, that there should be a role for nonprofit organizations, that there should be for every opportunity, an obligation; for every right, a responsibility.

And that is what national service is about. It is not coercive. Nobody is forced to get into the national service program. But I will tell you what they do. Their lives are significantly changed by it and their communities are significantly changed by it.

Young American men no longer have the shared experience of military service that served for the men of my generation as a rite of passage into adulthood. Where they learned that there was more to being a good citizen than just staying out of trouble. That instead, civic responsibility meant uniting with people of all different walks of life for a common purpose to help people help themselves; to be part of an American effort bigger than themselves.

National service is the latest in a long series of social inventions we have created to help provide access to higher education. We created night schools to teach immigrants English. We created the GI bill for returning veterans, and we invented community colleges to bring higher education close to home at a modest cost.

The argument that national service is coerced voluntarism is a knee-jerk statement that belies the facts. I chaired the Appropriations Subcommittee which has funded national service in the past. In the first 2 years of the Clinton administration, no one coerced anyone to participate. Instead, people were knocking down the doors to join.

Two facts make this point. First of all, there are more people who want to participate than there are opportunities.

In national service's first 2 years, about 1,500 organizations applied for funds. Only 300 were selected because of lack of funds. That is a selection rate of just 20 percent--a lower selection rate than peer-reviewed research grants at either the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health.

Second, in the current fiscal year, we provided enough funds to get about 23,000 people participating in full- or part-time national service. Yet since the President launched his call for a season of service, the Corporation for National Service has received calls from nearly 200,000 different persons wanting to participating in the program. So just 1 in 10 who have wanted to voluntarily participate have been able to do so.

Now some discount the kind of work undertaken through national service. They say it is trivial, or unnecessary, or even irrelevant.