I volunteer to do what's already been done!

Barack Obama has come out with a plan to expand the Peace Corp and AmeriCorp by using tax breaks as an incentive to join.

Obama said he would expand the size of the AmeriCorps public service program from its current 75,000 positions to 250,000 slots; double the Peace Corps program that Kennedy founded from its current 7,800 volunteer positions to 16,000 positions by 2011; and create a national online network, modeled on Craigslist, to connect volunteers to service opportunities. ... He proposed a tax credit to pay up to $4,000 of college expenses for students willing to commit to 100 hours of community service a year.

Volunteering is great, and as long as these programs are actually doing effective, productive work (and I've heard that many of these programs bring very mixed results) then expanding them is fine.

What I don't get is why the government would need to set up "national online network, modeled on Craigslist," when we have....Craigslist. A quick look at the Volunteer link on the Washington, DC Craigslist page shows 32 opportunities for volunteering from yesterday alone, and that seems to be a fairly average number. And those are all LOCAL opportunities for volunteerism. I don't need to know what I could do to help out for a few hours in Chicago on a Tuesday night (though if I did, I'll bet I could go to the Craigslist-Chicago page and find one).

Why do so-called "progressives" think that to do the things they want to do, they have to build the system themselves when working with what you have - or letting the market handle it, as Craigslist and many other sites have done - is often the most efficient way to do it.

HT: Chronicles of Philanthropy

College costs

Marketing guru Seth Godin rants about the cost of college today:

According to The Chosen, an exhaustive study of college admissions, there's no measurable difference between the outcomes of education with the most exclusive schools and the next few tiers. Graduates don't end up happier. They don't end up with better paying jobs. They don't end up richer or even healthier. The whole thing is a sham (which costs a quarter of a million dollars a person at the top end).

Part of his assessment is that what really separates the "best" schools from the "average" schools is marketing and branding. This make sense, particularly, as he points out, among the baby boomer generation, who always want "what's best."

Godin's rant hits at a topic that Dr. Richard Vedder of Ohio University has been ranting about - from an academic perspective - for some time. His book, Going Broke By Degree, dove into this topic extensively, and his Center for College Affordability and Productivity spends its days trying to figure out why college costs have spun out of control even as the efficiency and effectiveness of college education seems stagnant. If this is a topic that interests you, CCAP, particularly its blog, will provide you with lots of information and insight, such as this suggestion to control costs.