The president showed he understands that Millennials are concerned about paying for college, getting a job, and not getting left out of health care if they can't.

Last night, listening to the State of the Union, I felt really proud of my president. I felt inspired. He spoke to me as a member of the Millennial generation.

There seems to be a lot of chatter in politics about how to help out my cohort -- talk of how to save my generation from a dystopian future of mountains of federal debt, an oppressive federal health care system, and illegal immigrants stealing our jobs. Lord knows, if you've caught any of the recent political debates on TV or in Washington, you've heard it too. (See the phrase: "It's for our children and grandchildren!")

Last night, President Obama showed that he understood that this kind of rhetoric is not what my generation needs. Fairness is at the heart of the solution. Millennials know it, and the president gets it. He also understands that fairness is not merely a virtue to aspire to, but a core value that we can tangibly work on -- and one that is at the center of what makes our country as strong and resilient as it is.

But the president was also right when he said that the defining issue of our time is how to keep the American dream alive. I know this to be true. Like the rest of my generation, I've watched friends and family struggle with what can feel at times like a Sisyphean challenge, but is, in fact, a challenge that can be met.

A close friend of mine, I'll call her Sara, found herself in trouble a few years ago. With the help of her extended family, she was able to afford attendance to a fantastic liberal arts school and major in what she loves. As a college student, she was eligible for health care under her parents' plan. Unfortunately, with the onset of the recession, her family was no longer able to support her education and she was forced to drop out of school. Sara moved back home and began searching for a job. No longer a student, she was now ineligible for coverage under her parents' health care plan. She was out of school, out of a job, without health care. At the time, she described to me her health care strategy: "Don't get hit by a bus."

Sara was not alone in her experience, nor in her health care strategy. And this unfortunate experience has become one that is too familiar.

This is the kind of experience that the president had in mind when he said we need to "return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility." We must ensure that my generation gets a fair shake: a fair chance to get a good education, a good-paying job, and an opportunity like everyone else to support ourselves and our future families without having to adopt a "don't get hit by a bus" strategy.

The 2012 election is already in full swing and the ideological camps are staked out. The pundits and candidates have painted a campaign pitting individual liberty against the shared responsibility and fair deal the president laid out. This is, in fact, a false choice.

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As the president said, "No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together." We were able to do so because individuals made the choice to do great things as a community, as a state, as a nation. The role of government is and should be to, as Lincoln said and the president reminded us, "do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves." Yet there is much that we simply cannot do alone -- much that we must work together to achieve.

Many of the challenges that the president has faced thus far required not individuals, communities, or states to address, but a country as a whole. Because the president understands this reality, 2.5 million young people now have health insurance, thousands of college students are now eligible for more funding through Pell Grants and can more easily pay back their federal loans, tens of thousands of young people are coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and millions of Americans are finding work and climbing out of the terrible hole they are in.

The president encouraged us to act as a nation so that we can take on these larger questions. Furthermore, the notion that these accomplishments run counter to or limit individual liberty misses the mark. Beyond the fact that health care, college aid, and employment maximize individual liberty, they allow us to begin at the same starting line. It is disappointing, and perhaps surprising, when such an agenda is labeled "extreme" and "pro-poverty," as it was in the formal response to the State of the Union, or dismissed as "a hodgepodge of little ideas" in the Tea Party response.

There is still plenty of progress to be made, and like many Americans and many Millennials, there are policies and goals I have wanted to see politically that haven't been realized. I know we're not there yet.

But I was thrilled to hear the president make proposals that are directed at my generation: doubling the number of federal work-study jobs in the next five years, calling on Congress to send him a law to give young immigrants the chance to earn their citizenship, and reducing the red tape that stifles the creativity of young entrepreneurs.

In 1910, Teddy Roosevelt went to Osawatomie, Kansas, and declared, "I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service."

Fairness isn't important simply because it speaks to the best of us as people. For after the famously profound "we hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," just after the piece about "inalienable rights," a little bit past explaining that among those are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," there is an oft forgotten piece: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men."

Last night, the president clearly and compellingly reminded us of the potential we hold and the great work we stand to accomplish together.

Adin Lenchner is the president of the Wheaton College (MA) Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network chapter and is majoring in political science.

Ten years later, schools are struggling to comply with the law while students have seen few improvements.

This Sunday marked the 10-year anniversary of the re-write of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, reauthorized as the more recognizable No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This single act dramatically changed education reform over the last decade, and its negative effects are still reverberating.

NCLB drastically reshaped the landscape of primary and secondary education. It introduced accountability and standardized tests and tied them to funding. States could either forfeit Title I funds or move their schools to having 100 percent of students proficient in math and reading by 2014. The punishment for not achieving these yearly benchmarks were severe: after a number of years, offending schools would be legally mandated to restructure or close.

The basis for NCLB evolved from North Carolina and Texas, which had testing and accountability programs that created substantial academic progress for these states. However, once it was implemented, even those states failed to achieve gains, particularly in closing the achievement gap.

NCLB overstepped the federal government's role in education, which was previously to ensure equity, be it for poor, special needs, or minority students. This was accomplished previously through actions such as Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, IDEA (Individuals with Education Disabilities Act), and Title I funding.

Ten years after its passage, we find that a large portion of schools are not on track to achieve proficiency goals. While state-based standardized test scores have often increased, scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a low-stakes national standardized test, have remained flat. So has the percent of minority and poor students achieving at the highest level on the NAEP. This isn't terribly surprising, as one of the biggest ramifications of NCLB is that it oriented teaching to students who are on the border of proficiency, rather than all students.

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But these increases in state standardized testing performance have not been sufficient to avert the weight of accountability measures. As a result, we've seen the federal government once again overstep its role of ensuring equity with waivers in exchange for substantial state policy adjustments.

Ten years later, we find our Congress in a different yet eerily similar situation. Just with the original making of NCLB, our decisions are rushed, and thoughtful decisions for the sake of the people are sacrificed for political appearances.

Future iterations of the law should consider the policy environment of North Carolina as a model for improving schools. North Carolina's schools receive more funding from state sources than do most others, which allows for more equitable funding across school districts. Also, North Carolina is unique in its efforts to improve its lowest performing schools. Following a case about poor school performance, a North Carolina Superior Court judge tasked the state with improving 40 of its lowest performing high schools. For almost a decade, he has been the impetus for an agency that focuses on these public schools. Beyond that, he's kept an eye on legislative action, crying foul when there was an attempt to cut funding for standardized testing in non-core subjects, something he claimed was necessary to ensure  academic quality in high school.

If the federal government desires involvement in education in excess of its charge of guaranteeing equality of educational opportunity, it should focus its efforts on uniting different branches and levels of government at the state and local levels to develop and reinforce our existing system of checks and balances to move coherently and robustly toward sustainable improvement.

Grayson Cooper is the Senior Fellow for Education Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and is currently a senior at the University of North Carolina.

Under FDR's leadership, the U.S. reacted to defeat at Pearl Harbor by working together to build a new world order. How will millennials measure up?

When Japan attacked our nation on December 7, 1941, FDR responded decisively. He called on the federal government to marshal all of its resources and cited the "unbounding determination of the people" to rise to the challenge. Our grandparents rallied to the call of the federal government and marched to victory in World War II. In the wake of that conflict, they built an international system that enshrined democratic values and a global economic framework for shared prosperity.

Throughout history, the United States has consistently used its crushing defeats as a springboard to rise to national action. Those defeats are a reminder to us that we are stronger together and that we can only succeed by facing our challenges with determination and innovation. An energetic government built the railroads, constructed the interstate highway system, and put a man on the moon. A strong government ended slavery, desegregated our schools, and defeated the forces of fascism and Nazism.

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Today our country again faces the specter of defeat. Our economy has stalled, our financial system continues to hover near collapse, and the international system is under assault from new threats like terrorism, climate change, and energy scarcity. But in the face of economic catastrophe, our leaders bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street. And instead of engaging global leaders to build a plan for joint action to face down threats to the international order, our leaders are calling for reductions in U.S. foreign assistance and reducing our role in world affairs.

Right now, millions of people around the world are living in a state of desperation. And right now, millions of Americans are living in poverty and out of work. There is no other solution to these problems except for bold, strong, and coordinated government action.

Every generation is defined by the challenges it meets and overcomes. In our time, we have the same mission our grandparents had when they battled through the Great Depression and won World World II: We need to build a foundation for shared prosperity and make the world safe for democracy. We can honor their sacrifice and honor the vision of FDR by responding to our challenges together as a country.

Reese Neader is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's Policy Director.

With unemployment at a sickly 9 percent, a renewed push for public service jobs may be just what the doctor ordered.

The Occupy movement has often been criticized for lacking an overarching political message. One of the roots of its discontentment is not so difficult to discern, though: the enduringly high level of under- and unemployment. While the popular debate on the level of unemployment is highly partisan, politicized, and unproductive, Occupy is telling us that we cannot lose sight of the personal cost of unemployment. It also merits a more serious study of why joblessness remains so high. While there are a wide variety of global macro-economic factors that are contributing to the sputtering economic recovery, one process that could be at play is often referred to as unemployment hysteresis. This term describes the way in which temporary shocks to employment levels can cause more long-lasting unemployment.

In 1986, Lawrence Summers and Olivier Blanchard wrote an influential paper in which they discussed some of the possible ways this process can occur. First and foremost, there can be a difference in bargaining power between the unemployed and the remaining workforce. Those who have retained their jobs can manage, through organized labor or simply through contractual stipulations, to prevent wages from declining in the bust cycle. As a result, the price of labor cannot decrease as aggregate demand is falling and therefore the demand for labor cannot increase. The employed can thereby effectively block the unemployed from the labor market. Furthermore, the remaining workforce may also bargain in such a way that when economic recovery sets in, their wages and productivity increase, and thus the recovery does not translate into increased employment but rather into increased payment for those already working.

Alongside the difference in bargaining power there is a second, though not mutually exclusive, reason for sustained unemployment. This has to do with the loss in skills of those who have become unemployed. Their knowledge and skills, especially if they are on the sideline for a fairly long period, become outdated, rendering them less appealing to employers.

A possible diagnosis of hysteresis has crucial policy implications. We may very well be dealing with an increase in unemployment that cannot be attributed to an increase in the natural rate of unemployment, but rather to a shock-induced structural increase. After all, it is unlikely that the natural unemployment of the United States, determined by its total production capacity including factors such as its population size, has changed dramatically in the course of the last three years. If this is so, then expansionary demand policy, on the condition that it is implemented well, may bring the unemployment level back down.

Indeed, there is some interesting tentative evidence that seems to point to hysteresis in the United States today. While it is hard to measure a loss in skill sets, it is possible to take a look at the development of wages versus the growth in GDP.

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Here, it seems that some of the high unemployment in the United States could potentially be attributed to the build-up of a wage differential. While output declined significantly in the recession of 2008-2009, wage levels did not decline accordingly, but stayed high.

So what we are seeing is a slightly dualistic labor market from which the large pool of unemployed people is excluded. With our political system incapable of providing the stimulus the economy needs, this calls for a grassroots public service employment plan across the country, with each community organizing its public service jobs according to its needs and goals. This would greatly benefit those who are locked out of the private labor market and the economy at large. Working in public service jobs tailored to their talents, knowledge, and interests, they can keep their skill sets up to date. We cannot afford to leave 9 percent of the labor force behind. The increase in employment from such a plan would stimulate demand in the private sector, reopening the labor market and paving the way for public workers to move into the private sector.

Furthermore, an embedded public service plan would constitute a form of an automatic stabilizer in boom and bust cycles -- absorbing labor in bad times and releasing labor in good times.

Governments traditionally face a nasty tradeoff when it comes to unemployment benefits. Paul Krugman argued that the reason Europe experienced high unemployment throughout the 1980s and early 1990s was that European states were providing compensation for the unemployed that was too high. With technological changes decreasing the wages of low-skilled jobs, they came too close to unemployment benefits, taking away the incentive to hold a job. In response, a government can decide to stop providing these benefits, thereby keeping employment levels high but increasing inequality in the process.

However, there is also a middle road that blunts some of the sharp edges of this tradeoff. If the benefits are connected to a public service job, and only to a public service job, then we can take care of the unemployed, reducing inequality, while simultaneously incentivizing them to work. With almost 10 percent of the American workforce ready, willing, and able to hold a job but unable to find one, public service employment would undoubtedly appeal to many.

Hysteresis is a disease with a cure. Despite earlier attempts to remedy this disease, with unemployment still at 9 percent, we cannot give up on public service employment. Perhaps we can learn from Occupy in that sense as well: do not give up too easily.

Sander Tordoir is a former Summer Academy Fellow for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and remains involved with the Campus Network from Istanbul.

Reese Neader is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's Policy Director.