It is actually pretty horrible, as it stands.

For the kind of students who party their way through college, it would merely be a big waste of time. (Yes, waste. Forced community service always ends up going into lame make-work projects.) But for more earnest college students it would be a disaster. For the kids working their way through college, it would be a crushing burden to lose 2 1/2 weeks of fulltime work every year to government mandated projects. And for students who already spend their time on genuinely public minded projects, like open source, it would mean either (a) filling out a lot of paperwork to get the project certified, or (b) being yanked away from it for 100 hours a year, which is a large fraction of the time a college student can afford to spare for side projects.

If (as other parts of the website seem to suggest) the policy is actually that you $4k tax credit if you choose to do the service, this isn't such a huge problem. If you have a job that pays more than $40/hr, don't quit it to do the service. If you don't have such a job, then figure out what your options for service are and decide whether $40/hr is sufficient motivation to get you to do them.

The stuff about the tax credit wasn't there till a couple minutes ago. That changes everything, of course. Then it becomes just one of those make-work projects like e.g. Boston organizes during the summer to keep unemployable teenagers busy till school starts again.

Tax credit info has been on a different page (http://change.gov/agenda/education/) for longer than that. It contradicted the info on the linked page and that contradiction was apparently resolved a few minutes ago.

Reactions:

* 100 hours! Shocking! Tell it to the Israelis who, last I checked, didn't seem to have much of a problem building up a technology industry.

* The nerd exceptionalism is wearing a bit thin. Open source is the best you can come up with? How about: (a) teaching, (b) improving technological infrastructure (testing and improving muni and state web applications, helping administer muni wifi), (c) collecting, refurbing, and recycling computing equipment?

* Or for that matter: a large fraction of Obama's margin of victory came from mobilization of youth and first-time voters, and his overperformance of polls in Indiana are also attributable to the field operation: people wandering around towns in Indiana knocking on doors. Can't get more low-tech make-work than that. But that effort was disproportionately staffed with clueful, Internet-savvy college students. Lots of valuable work isn't sexy, but still benefits from smart people figuring out where when and how to do it right.