Like most of my friends and classmates at Penn, I spent Election Night singing and dancing in the streets. A few students hauled drums out of their apartments, and we headed to City Hall, chanting "O-ba-ma!" as we hugged one another and pumped our fists.

But while most young people can still feel the remnants of postelection euphoria, the complex problems of the moment effectively pit our pragmatism against our idealism. Recent graduates are flocking to programs such as Teach for America and AmeriCorps, determined to make a difference. At the same time, though, there are more financial barriers to service.

More than half the nation's students are graduating with heavy debts caused partly by rising tuition. Once upon a time, students pursued high-salary private-sector jobs to pay off their loans. Now it's harder to get the loans and the jobs.

That's why a proposed U.S. Public Service Academy could do so much good. Dreamed up by two Teach for America alumni, it would be a tuition-free college modeled after the military academies. Students would be educated according to a rigorous liberal-arts curriculum supplemented by leadership and service learning, mandatory study abroad, and public-sector internships. In return, they would be required to work for five years postgraduation as civil servants. Their jobs would run the gamut from teaching and emergency services at the local level to ranking federal government jobs.

A bill to create the academy was recently introduced in Congress. A recent poll showed 88 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds support the idea. Many Philadelphia politicians, including Mayor Nutter, Gov. Rendell, and Sen. Arlen Specter, have also said they support it. Nutter even expressed interest in finding a place for it in the city's Navy Yard.

President Obama's call to service has primed hearts and minds for the academy, but there's a much more practical rationale: Baby boomers, who have filled public-service roles for so long, are beginning to retire, creating a dearth of public-sector workers. Replacing them with committed, passionate people will emerge as a priority and could send an unprecedented jolt through the public sector.

The idealism embodied in my classmates' midnight march can be translated into positive, everyday change that works well beyond one euphoric night. It's time we created the Public Service Academy and turned our desire to serve into a long-standing commitment to teaching and producing the next generation of public-sector leaders.

She can be contacted at schwenk@uspublicserviceacademy.org.