I remember reading a while back that the enlisted soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War represented the least educated American military in a long time—until the 2003 Iraq invasion. While this seems plausible to me, I can’t find anything to back this up—or to provide evidence to the contrary. Indeed, I can’t find historical statistics of United States military personnel anywhere. I need to know the facts for an article I’m writing; I don’t want to look like an idiot by not being able to back up my facts.
If anyone can provide solid statistics on the trend of education levels in the U.S. military during conflicts—preferably showing levels of high school and college degrees attained—I’d appreciate it. These are devilishly hard to find. Thanks.
I don’t see how there is a lot of room for movement with the percentages. Enlisted personnel almost always need a high school diploma or possibly a GED in rare cases to enlist in the military at all. Almost all officers have college degrees. Most officers are produced through ROTC programs at traditional colleges and universities and others come out of the military academies which are universities themselves. The minimum education requirements should be a pretty strong floor on the minimum education levels for both commissioned and non-commissioned officers.
The only way you could see a downward trend is to say that many enlisted personnel (meaning Private, Sargent etc.) used to enter the service with college degrees which I am not buying. The other way would be to say that the percentage of officers (Lieutenant and up) with graduate degrees has been declining which I am also not buying.
Where did this assertion come from and how can the question be formed so it makes more sense?
I really don’t remember where it came from. The impression I get was that it addressed a declining education level in enlisted personnel during specific conflicts—that’s to say, you’re more likely to see people with college degrees quit their jobs and join the military during a conflict than you are during peacetime. I guess the information I really need is the education level among enlisted personnel during specific conflicts. I’d suspect there were more college-educated enlistees during World War II than during the 1991 Gulf War, for example.
That’s funny, I seem to recall hearing the opposite. IIRC, David Hackworth, who was an army colonel, served in various wars from post-WWII to Vietnam, and later became a commentator on military affairs, said that the troops in the 1991 Gulf War were the best-educated he’d ever met.
I couldn’t Google a direct cite for my memory above, but here: CONTRARY BRIN: October 2004 there’s an assertion that the US Army’s officer corps is the third-best educated “clade” in American society after college professors and medical doctors.
Well, there is a difference between the educational levels of enlisted recruits (High scool or GED equivalent was required) and what they leave the service as.
Hard to collate.
So far, taking advantage of the educational (i.e. college) benifits is voluntary. Not all take advantage of them, but a lot do. The more senior enlisted ranks by and large do take advantage of these benifits, aometimes because it helps them advance in pay grade (through better annual fitness reports), other times because they wish to prepare for their post service lives.
Also, there is a lot of “Trade school” and “leadership and management” type of training that the military provides as a matter of course, to help the service members do their military jobs. This training is not necessarily acredited… does it count?
Hehe. I suppose of Sen. Kerry’s gaff, a lot of folks are gpnna be researching this.
Well, as I said above, I’m more looking for the levels of education among enlisted members during America’s conflicts than I am for the military personnel in general. I figure those statistics would vary.
What you call a “gaffe,” I’d call an accurate observation being exploited for cheap political gain by the Republican Party. Just goes to show you how many different points of view there are on this matter, doesn’t it?
Why only enlisted? Or am I doing all this work for you, because you have an ax to grind? So, if the official statistics don’t agree with your personal beliefs, will you discard them? Or ignore them?
I don’t mind being helpful, and I am learning, but I sure as shit ain’t going to be happy if this is just some partisan ploy to say “Hey, the military IS stupid,” and by selecting certain eras and cherry picking demographics you make your point. If it’s true, it’s true, and if it ain’t, it ain’t, but let the facts stand on their own merit.
dahfisheroo—Clearly you’re better at this than I am. That pdf was great; that information does suggest that there hasn’t been much movement one way or another between the education levels of troops during the Gulf War and the Iraq occupation. If you could dig up something comparing this data with the education levels of enlistees in, say, Vietnam and Korea, and maybe even World War II, you’d be my heroine!
Whoa! Where’s this coming from? I’m looking for trends in education among enlisted personnel for an article I’m writing. I don’t know about this “Hey, the military is stupid!” crusade. Where are you getting this? I’m seeking facts, and that’s all. I’m not out to cherry-pick information. Just because I didn’t respond positively to someone’s slant on current events doesn’t mean I hate the military. Good lord, half my family is or has been in the military. We’ve got veterans of every major conflict of the 20th century apart from Vietnam in my family, and I whole-heartedly supported the 1991 Gulf War. And I’m not turning on my family, in case anyone wants to try to draw that conclusion.
If I wanted to idiotically make my claim without having any facts to back them up, I wouldn’t be asking. People bullshit their way through arguments, articles and anything else all the time. I’m capable of it, but I don’t do it. Ever.
> I remember reading a while back that the enlisted soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War
> represented the least educated American military in a long time—until the 2003
> Iraq invasion.
Utterly and completely wrong. The average level of education has been rising for decades at least. Since the mid-1970’s the rise has been particularly fast. In the mid-1970’s, just after the Vietnam War, the military realized that they had been taking a lot of not particularly good enlisted men and women to fill out their ranks. They decided to improve the general quality of the enlisted men and women. At that point, they no longer had to worry about people who had been drafted. They began requiring not just high school degrees but good scores on the (sort of) I.Q. tests that recruits had to take. They decided to no longer take people (in their late teens and early twenties) who had been ordered by judges to either enlist or serve time in jail (because of minor crimes). They got more picky about making sure that no one who was likely to be a discipline problem joined.
They increased the pay and the benefits to be able to get the people they needed. Increasingly, enlisted people are ones who plan to get college degrees eventually and who spend a certain amount of time while in the service working on picking up some courses to their degrees. Very many enlisted people are fairly smart kids from working-class backgrounds who if they had come from middle-class backgrounds would surely have gone straight into college. Because they come from families where most of their relatives didn’t go to college, they decided to serve a few years in the military and earn money for college. Many of them after picking up enough courses for a bachelor’s degree decide to become officers, so they take a qualifying test and go to Officers Candidate School.
Officers are increasingly well educated too. It takes a college degree to become an officer. It almost always takes a master’s degree to make it to the rank of major.
The only possible thing I can think of that might explain your claim is that there might have been a slight drop in the average level of education in the past year or two. It’s been hard to recruit for the past year or two. It’s possible the standards have slipped slightly during that time.
This guy got his information from VA web sites; I wish he’d give more specific source citations.
Now, to parse this information: 79% Of the men who served Vietnam had a high school education or better when they entered the military service. (63% Of Korean War Vets and only 45% of WW II Vets had completed high school upon separation), says the source I just cited in this post. An according to this link provided by dafisheroo, enlisted military have had a consistent 95% of at least a high school education between 1990 and 2003. So it looks like it’s gone up, despite the targeting of the poor by military recruiters. Of course, simply having a high school diploma these days is much more common, so this data might not say much at all either way, due to the way the intangible value of a high school diploma has apparently dropped since the days when you could quit high school at age 16 and get a good job in a factory and still raise a family, like my uncle did. These days, you usually can’t make more than minimum wage without at least a GED. I suppose I’ll have to look up actual high school graduation rates between 1940 and today if I want this information to matter—so I’ll do that.
Thanks, everyone, for your help, despite the aspersions that have been cast on my motives. When you’re the type who supports the military but not the current president and his party, it happens far more often than you could imagine.
Ok, sorry, it was just starting to feel like a loaded question. I’m a little tired, frustrated at the DoD, my lack of google-fu, and more than likely coming off a sugar high from all the candy I pilfered from the kids.
It’s not my claim, Wendell—it’s someone else’s hypothesis that I’m not willing to take at face value. That’s why I’m doing this research. Intellectual honesty is important to me.
If we’ve seen a drop in the education levels among those currently deployed, I wouldn’t be surprised, simply because recruiting has been so difficult, as you pointed out. But the comparison between Vietnam and the Gulf War tell more of a story. The education level of those in the military versus the population as a whole might be more relevent because the increasing overall saturation of education in this country since World War II would likely affect all groups. It would also probably put more of a premium on higher degrees, and… well, in all, this would make comparing education levels between World War II and now irrelevent. Much like comparing automobile ownership between 2006 and 1920: sure, people owned cars then, as they do now, but not nearly as many, and people presumably didn’t need cars as much back then. A comparison of the data over that 86-year period would be irrelevent.
I’d expect the education level of officers to be high no matter what, and I’m not surprised to see it rising, since that’s happening with many other professions.
