Getting a 50 on the ASVAB is no small feat. It’s not a particularly hard test but it’s not kind to folks who aren’t good test-takers. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone who flunked out of high school also had a hard time getting a 50.
My father & 3 of his buddies all joined the military missing 2/3rds of their senior year – they left early and enlisted. The school just gave them ‘early graduation’ so they could leave school in December, 1941. Must have worked out OK – they all came back with decorations.
No, those people are weeded out in Basic Training.
The military drill sergeants have ways of motivating recruits, and are good at picking out those who are more trouble than they’ll be worth to the service. For them, “Entry-Level Separation” is the official term, and they do not get Veteran status or any VA benefits.
Thanks for the clarification.
It certainly weeds out people who are not motivated by high school.
I’ve known many people, including two I’m closely related to, who were not motivated enough by high school to graduate but were motivated to work like draft animals at their jobs because the cared about the later but not about the former. Some went on to excel at post secondary education.
No doubt many who drop out of high school are lazy slobs but as a filter, the diploma is prone to false positives.
Sure. And many people who excelled at high school went on to suck at life.
Nonetheless, anybody who can’t deal with the tedium and stupidity of many high school classes is not well suited to the tedium and stupidity of basic training, A-school, or sitting for six hours in front of a panel full of gages with needles that don’t move while their ship steams at four knots to nowhere. Anybody who drops out of high school rather than put up with the capriciousness or incompetence of many high school teachers is not going to have an easy time with the capriciousness or incompetence of many drill instructors, LPOs, or Captains.
Can’t argue with that.
Would that it were so simple… I mean, sure, they weed out some, but there’s a reason the military has administrative separations, too.
More precisely, it weeds out people who weren’t motivated as teenagers. Even if they’re only motivated by getting a job, “I want to graduate high school so I can get a job” is a good enough motivator to get through high school. I’ve had plenty of those students.
Now, it may well be that, some time after dropping out, someone might change their life, or have it changed for them, in such a way that they are now motivated. Maybe they’re just more mature now. Maybe they have a kid, and want to give the kid more than they have. Maybe they got in trouble with the law, and don’t want it to happen again, whatever. Some of those folks, of course, go back to get their GED, but some of them, if they’ve meanwhile managed to find a job that doesn’t require a diploma but meets their needs, might decide to just stick with it and work hard.
Seems to me what the Navy should be doing is changing the benefits. If they could significantly increase pay and loan-forgiveness, for instance, they’d get more recruits. All kinds of college grads are drowning in student loans. Especially at a time when many are still suffering financially despite whatever ‘recovery’ the economy is having right now. And with the sky-high cost of living, some sort of benefit like “your spouse and kids can have a $800/month subsidy for apartment rent” would go very far in attracting people, unless there is already some such benefit that I have not heard of.
I’m pretty sure that any of that would require an act of Congress (Cf. “Bill” in “GI Bill”). As you may have noticed, Congress isn’t capable of doing much of anything these days.
That being said, you’re not wrong that better benefits would help with recruitment and retention.
The two I’m really talking about are my sister and my son. I really can’t say how representative they are. I think I remember you’re in education? Maybe you know way more high school dropouts than I do.
But in regard to those two. I don’t think anything about them ever changed. High school for both was something they couldn’t submit to but it was only that one thing refused and they then went on with their lives.
I can’t really explain it. Their utter disdain for secondary education is an important part of who they are but it doesn’t seem to relate to the rest of their lives in an obvious way.
I do think they’d be shit soldiers though and that hasn’t changed.
The benefits are already really good. There is a student loan forgiveness program. The post-911 GI Bill is much better than the Montgomery GI Bill I used. The pay plus benefits aren’t bad once you get past the first couple of grades.
OK, I’m certainly not going to say that I know my students better than you know your family. Which means that I just plain can’t explain those cases.
Curious how that works - had you already cleared the inactive reserve time from your army enlistment contract, or do they waive that if you enlist in a different service?
I believe at the time eight years was my inactive reserve so it already cleared it, but I also believe that if you join a different branch it “counts” as active service as part of it.
This. But gotta be a little bit careful with the term “benefits” which usually means everything except salary / hourly rate of pay.
Since the DoD cannot unilaterally adjust wages to deal with the ebbs and flows of the economy or of inflation, they are stuck with adjusting the requirements for initial enlistment and taking the hit (or benefit) of lower (or higher) quality recruits when the economy shifts.
If Congress would change the laws such that DoD, like private businesses, had the flex to adjust wages to attract talent of whatever fixed level they want / need, this problem would go away.
But then we’d all be whining about how DoD’s personnel costs are exploding more than they already are.
An interesting angle on falling recruitment detailing a problem I hadn’t heard of:
The article highlights a real problem, but completely misses it. Like pointing a magnifying glass at flaking paint, but paying no mind to the growing gap in the ceiling that requires structural repairs (and which is causing the paint around the gap to flake).
The Pentagon has shifted judgment from our recruiters to an electronic screening system inaptly named “Military Health System Genesis,” instantly shrinking the recruiting pool. Genesis is an invasive magnifying glass that scours the cloud, highlighting doctor visits and prescriptions back to childhood. Understaffed health units — mostly civilians today — must investigate all the red flags.
The problem isn’t that recruiters used to be allowed to use judgment, but now his Genesis system has supplanted that. It’s that this Genesis system highlights the multitudinous areas in which recruiters advised recruits to lie, omit, or otherwise misrepresent important medical information. Which was always wrong. But because there was no quick way to verify a recruit’s own health history unless it was a very obvious condition that would show up during a cursory examination, lots of recruits with disqualifying conditions slipped by.
The problem, then, to the extent there is one, is likely that the Navy’s recruiting standards (like the other services) are and have been unrealistic, but overly-credulous senior leaders (another huge problem) never found out because their tendency was to look the other way. When the occasional new recruit actually did come forward (often after getting caught), and then spilled the beans that their recruiter told them to lie, the reaction was almost always to treat it as if the recruit was just making shit up to avoid accountability and smearing their poor, innocent recruiter in the process, rather than to (a) seriously investigate the claims or even (b) reevaluate whether certain conditions should really be disqualifying.
15 percent of WWII veterans received disability benefits; 43 percent of post-9/11 veterans receive payments, at higher disability ratings.
What changed? Troops who are injured in combat and training, or debilitated after long laborious careers, remain undercompensated. Those who briefly serve stateside and invoke preexisting traumas receive too much.
And this is patent bullshit. Preexisting conditions are not covered unless they are aggravated by service. But if they are aggravated by service, why shouldn’t they be covered the to extent they are aggravated?
And perhaps the disparity between WWII and the GWOT is (1) the vast majority of WWII-era veterans, contrary to popular perception, (2) most WWII vets also never left the states during their time in the military, much less multiple times over the course of multiple enlistments during smaller but longer wars (with no draft to fight them, and so a relatively small pool of personnel to fight them), and (3) maybe the VA did a really loudly job of screening the millions upon millions of demobilizing WWII vets as the war ended, and so many with real issues that needed treatment, whether they served overseas or no, never got it?
That’s odd, in this context.
That is actually the DoD military health care system’s e-records system. Or at least, that’s what it is if you’re already part of the system.
As an electronic medical records system, I imagine it would simplify (and maybe automate) some correlations that would spot medical issues that would disqualify service induction.
I guess the pronouncement of an MHS Genesis analysis is overriding a recruiter’s hypothetical discretion about medical eligibility?
IMO, I’m not sure that’s a terrible thing. In my military career, I saw young troops enter service with what should have been disqualifying existing conditions, but the service waived the disqualification. And frankly, should have been disqualified.
Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game, unless you’re Russia and you want maximum quantity of cannon fodder.
There are a few issues that contribute. One is absolutely they didn’t do a good job treating WWII vets that didn’t have obvious problems. And those vets didn’t know how to fight the system. Or didn’t care to. Now everyone is told to document everything and the barracks lawyers push you to try for the money.
Another contributing factor is legislation put in place over the years. There is legislation covering Agent Orange exposure, Gulf War Syndrome and the newest one to cover burn pit exposure. I’m not saying those aren’t real issues but they presume conditions are service related even when they may not be. My father in law spent a year in Vietnam. He’s rated at 100% disabled because of diabetes. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? Maybe. Was his diabetes caused by that? No way of really knowing. I’m currently going through the process with the PACT Act for breathing issues. I know my issues. I know I was in Iraq during the time specified. Will they say there is a connection? I don’t know. But it’s certain that post WWII they weren’t looking at anything that wasn’t obvious.
Another big contributor is the VA start benefits for PTSD until the 1980s. Vets from previous conflicts could then get rated for it but it wasn’t backdated.