Every Philly College Student Should Have a City Government Internship

Jan. 25, 2017

It's get commonplace to observe that postal service-election America has devolved into a tale of two countries. To speak in gross but reasonably accurate generalities, we're divided into Trump World versus Urban Globe. The Trump one-half of America is rural and exurban. The other half lives in the core cities and their closer-in suburbs. Both sides run across the other as an existential threat.

Last week, I posited remaking our City Charter into a moral document, the starting time of three pocket-sized proposals that can hopefully jumpstart a conversation near how Urban World tin brace itself for its accelerating crash into Trump World.

Perhaps nothing better captures the progressive, forrard-looking orientation of Urban World versus the regressive, backward-facing orientation of Trump World than the fact that, as Mark Muro and Sifan Liu at the Brookings Establishment have found, "The less-than-500 counties that Hillary Clinton carried nationwide encompassed a massive 64 percent of America'south economic activity equally measured by full output in 2015. By contrast, the more-than-2,600 counties that Donald Trump won generated merely 36 per centum of the country's output—just a little more than 1-third of the nation's economic activeness."

Institutions exercise non change easily. Merely the urban center equally an establishment is as well a reflection of our ideals, and the style to bear upon change is to realign our ideals with our new reality. Nosotros need to reconstruct American federalism and then that cities take their rightful place aslope states as sovereign powers. The outset stride, as covered last week, is to create a stronger sense of citizenship based on the unique and primal virtues of cities. Next comes a focus on the brotherhood of our city's nigh powerful institutions:

Create Stronger Partnerships Between Cities and Their Universities

Universities are some of the almost powerful institutions in cities, especially Rustbelt cities, and and then if cities are going to be empowered they need stronger partnerships with universities. Colleges and universities are too the principal vehicles of upward mobility and financial security in our guild, and the increasing price of higher educational activity is i of the central features of both growing economic inequality and the divide between Urban World and Trump World. How to lower the cost of higher pedagogy is a topic that is both crucial to the hereafter of American cities and also across the scope of this essay. I volition, still, advise a few steps that might begin to make universities slightly more open places, in a way that might likewise strengthen cities.

Since at least World War 2 at that place has been an institutional and functional convergence between cities and their universities, based on their mutual identities equally organizations that do not then much produce any specific matter, as provide an surround that encourages the production of many different things. Both cities and universities engage in similar economical development projects (building stadiums, for example) and they provide many of the aforementioned services, such as police, parks, housing, education, workforce development, and libraries. In fact, university students tin can exist conceived of as city residents who pay a higher level of taxes, in the class of tuition, for a higher level of services, such as better libraries, gyms, parks and landscaping, and a core of educators offering classes for their enrichment and professional advancement.

Conceiving of universities equally cities also highlights social inequalities. Cities don't provide university-level services because their populations are simply not wealthy enough to afford the kind of taxation rate that a university charges through tuition. Indeed, during budget shortfalls cities tend to cut back on precisely the kinds of services offered by universities, such as libraries. Moreover, universities are able to efficiently provide services because they tin screen out residents who have significant problems and who would thus be a drain on their resources. Cities do not have that luxury, and much of their resources have to go to the residents with the biggest problems, who near likely would never get admitted to universities.

Photo by Jeff Fusco for Visit Philadelphia

If the convergence between universities and cities were pushed a bit further, university services might be fabricated more widely available (extended, for instance, by combining tuition revenues with metropolis taxation dollars) and academy personnel (administrators, faculty, and students) might be compelled to grapple with, and assistance notice solutions for, issues of inequality that they don't often come up into contact with on campuses.

Some other style to rethink the relationship between cities and their universities is to massively expand city government internship programs (that is, programs where students work for gratis to gain experience and receive college credits) into every city agency and make those internships bachelor only to students at universities and colleges located in the city. In order to find the students for so many internships, all universities and colleges in Philadelphia would have to brand city government internships a requirement of their core curriculum.

Requiring every undergraduate student in Philadelphia to work one internship would transform our city government, as information technology would require that every urban center agency also accept an educational mission. Consider that in fall 2022 approximately nine,000 freshmen started college at just Temple, Penn, and Drexel. If all those students were to have full-fourth dimension internships in city government (including the school district) at the same fourth dimension, the combined city and schoolhouse district workforce would instantly be expanded past approximately twenty percent.

Though internships are ostensibly free labor, they likewise put a tremendous burden on urban center agencies, who under the program above would be constantly training scores of students for jobs that they would quickly leave. In club to make those interns more an asset than a hindrance to city agencies, Philadelphia colleges and universities would have to run pre-requisite courses that would train students for their internships, which would ideally be jointly taught by both faculty and city officials (which would provide those officials some offshoot salary, potentially making them a chip more than amenable to this plan).

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Given the scope of the programme at each schoolhouse, the coordination challenges of creating unlike prerequisite courses appropriate for unlike internships, and staffing those classes with appropriate faculty and urban center officials, both the pre-requisite courses and internships would have to be administered through new university academic departments that would be important platforms for collaboration between faculty and city officials.

Internships count for higher credit considering they ostensibly contribute to students' academic progress, typically accomplished through a kinesthesia advisor who provides assignments relevant to the internship and grades the student at the end. A massive scaling-upwards of urban center internships would require a somewhat unlike arroyo. The metropolis could create a new academic committee, including both city officials and kinesthesia from city colleges and universities, who would oversee the academic progress of student internships and host classes in the urban center during the time of those internships. Merely as the city regime internship departments would serve every bit platforms for collaboration between city officials and kinesthesia at specific schools, then would the academic commission serve as a platform for collaboration betwixt city officials and kinesthesia from all the participating schools.

The appropriate faculty and city officials for serving on the academic commission would exist what political scientist Daniel Carpenter has chosen "mezzo-level" actors—nearly probable department chairs and associate deans at universities, and directors or deputy commissioners in city government—who are high up plenty in their respective bureaucracies that they accept comprehensive understandings of how those bureaucracies work, and plenty authority to make decisions that tin can shape those bureaucracies. At the same fourth dimension, those actors should not be then high upward that they will rotate through their jobs quickly, as for instance deans and provosts frequently do in universities, or department commissioners do in urban center government. An accordingly staffed academic commission would serve both an oversight function for the urban center internships, and every bit a forum where metropolis and university officials could learn from ane another, and use that learning to shape their corresponding institutions.

Requiring every undergraduate pupil in Philadelphia to work 1 internship would transform our city regime, as it would require that every city agency likewise have an educational mission. Consider that in fall 2022 approximately 9,000 freshmen started college at just Temple, Penn, and Drexel. If all those students were to have full-time internships at the same time, the combined city and school district workforce would instantly be expanded past approximately 20 per centum.

The structure of the system I have sketched out hither is hardly novel. It looks, in fact, vaguely like The Harrisburg Internship Semester (which goes by the awkward acronym of THIS), with the major departure being scale. The THIS program hosted twelve interns in 2016; I am proposing that the City of Philadelphia host several thousand all at the same fourth dimension. THIS is premised on the idea that a few students should get some professional feel and resume-building opportunities in country government. By contrast, my proposed program, by mandating that all higher students take internships, would actually cheapen those internships equally distinctive work experience—merely it would begin to reconceive of metropolis governance as a generalized social function for which more people need to take responsibility.

There are likely to exist critiques. After all, devoting metropolis resource to college internships would redistribute those resources to an advantaged group, college students, and away from less advantaged groups, such as the bulk of city residents. The amount of resource the city would actually devote to a large-calibration internship program would depend on the resource universities committed, simply it would certainly cost something. At the same time, the extent to which the internships went to college students who could be considered "advantaged" would depend on which colleges were included in the plan. If the programme were ultimately scaled up fifty-fifty further to include fifty-fifty a portion of the 14,800 full-time students at Philadelphia Community College, or even high school seniors, it would be far less of a program for advantaged students and more of a tool that tin can assistance bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots.

Mandatory city government internships for all university and college students would add together a large new grouping to the ongoing collective chat most the city, and it would about likely change that chat, hopefully by making it more than open up to new ideas that challenge our notions of what both cities and universities tin and should practise together. The specific benefits could exist numerous—the programme could atomic number 82, for instance, to more graduates staying in the city, greater transparency in city decision-making, and maybe even more constructive service delivery—but at that place would undoubtedly be many unintended consequences of both the skillful and bad variety. This is true of every large social experiment. Like whatever novel policy information technology would require effective feedback mechanisms by which its impacts tin exist measured, and the program adjusted accordingly.

Next week, we'll examine the ways cities can increment their ability by literally growing in size.

Header photo by Jeff Fusco for Visit Philadelphia

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-university-and-the-city/

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