My understanding is a 4-year degree is necessary to become an officer in the US military.
As the subject line says, will any 4-year degree do? Does it matter what college/university you went to? Does your major matter? Or, do you just need that piece of paper from an accredited school?
I believe any four-year degree will do, but that’s just based on what I’ve heard. I’ve also heard that (in the '80s) ‘most’ military pilots had Liberal Arts degrees. I cannot attest to the veracity of that, and ISTM that maths or engineering would be more of a thing a pilot is interested in. OTOH I’m a pilot and, while I do ‘like’ math (because I had to work hard at it), I do like Literature and Film.
I believe it is any accredited four-year college.
So, a University of Phoenix degree in web page design is as good as an MIT degree in electrical engineering to be an officer in the US military? (both are accredited)
I believe you but seems crazy.
There’s a big difference between “it satisfies the minimal requirement” and “it’s as good as any other degree”.
Can you tell me which would be more appropriate without first knowing what that person’s job will be in the military?
No.
It means you get to be an officer. Whatever your job.
A four-year degree is a requirement (not counting certain positions that are open only to prior service). It does not, however, guarantee one will be commissioned as an officer. Plenty of people with four year degrees or even advanced degrees apply to become officers but don’t get it. Likewise, plenty of enlisted servicemembers have four-year degrees (whether completed prior to joining or during service).
You don’t “get” to be an officer just by having a four-year degree.
Same to become a Government agent. (Except FBI). The idea is that a 4 year degree qualifies you by learning to write papers, etc. I mean, how is electrical engineering gonna be useful for most MOS’s.
True, it is just a basic entry requirement, and there are exceptions to that.
I’d say it a little differently. Like any job, there are prereqs to even be considered. In this case a 4-year degree from an accredited school.
Then there is a competitive process where X number of candidates are applying for Y number of openings. When X<Y, any degree will do. When X > Y or worse yet X >> Y then degrees and schools matter. And matter a lot.
The commissioning source matters too. Simplifying a bit, each service has an academy, an ROTC program, and a post-college direct commissioning program commonly called OCS or OTS. Depending on the headcount required the services can turn up or down the throughput of OCS / OTS quickly, ROTC more slowly, and the academies almost not at all.
The academies are expensive to operate and of finite capacity. And each service controls which degrees they offer in which quantity. For example the Navy has lots of nuclear engineering slots at Annapolis. AFAIK, the Air Force has zero such slots at Colorado Springs.
ROTC is available at many colleges, both techie & non-techie. There are also so-called “cross-town” agreements where an ROTC unit at a large university also takes students attending nearby more minor colleges. Not all ROTC students are on ROTC-funded scholarships, but many are. The service of course chooses who to subsidize based at least partly on major. The size of ROTC detachments ebbs and flows with the DoD’s intake requirements. As does the supply of scholarships.
OCS / OTS is a roughly 3-months school to convert degreed post-college civilians into officers. When the services need that many. IME/IIRC the OTS/OCS programs are kept at least idling & producing a trickle of officers all the time, and expand quickly and significantly when a surge is needed.
All officers are leaders and managers. Damned near zero perform engineering or fancy math as part of their regular duties. Degrees in business management are at least as useful as degrees in e.g. mechanical engineering or physics. The sort of mind who majored in music or art history might not be too enamored of the job and wouldn’t bother applying. History & poli sci majors are in some demand. A LOT of senior officers have that sort of background, since at that level the military is an instrument of statecraft and degrees, including advanced degrees, in statecraft come with the territory.
It’s not real clear to me what the OP was thinking or what pre-conceived notion he was trying to reinforce or dispel.
I don’t know about that. It seems to presume:
FWIW, the Navy has had a strong bias towards math/science/engineering for longer than I was ever in (I feel like at one point even NROTC was being required to source 85% of its midshipmen from math/science/engineering fields?), and it’s a well known bit of trivia within the Navy that even an English major graduating from the Naval Academy will graduate with a Bachelor of Science, not a Bachelor of Arts, degree. Because there is just so damn much math, science, and engineering required.
Perhaps the Army is different, even very different, but then that only proves my point: the one thing every officer in the Army or and Navy have in common is that each applied to be a naval officer (I kid, I kid).
Anyway, not all degrees are equal, not all courses of study are equal, and, to the point of this thread, not all colleges are equal. Checking a box is one thing—I suppose they do all do that—but getting picked is something else.
But then again, the degree and school are not the only factors that will be evaluated in determining whether to select someone for a commissioning program. As previously stated, a degree is a requirement (note the indefinite article), but it does not guarantee a commission, (and here I’ll add) even if there is a shortage of applicants.
What your degree is in will probably also matter for determining your MOS, or Military Operational Specialty: Basically, your job within the military. The most common one, and usually the least-desired, is combat grunt (I think this is officially designated “rifleman”, or something like that). But if you have some specialized skill that the military has use for, you might get assigned to that, instead.
Especially in the nuclear Navy. Also, it’s helpful if the Civil Engineering Corps, which is the officer corps for the Seabees, has some engineering/math expertise. I knew some real lunkheads who ended up as Army officers, but perhaps they’ve tightened up the requirements.
I may be wrong, but from the short time I spent looking at their website, I don’t think there is such a thing (though there are classes in web design, and degree programs that include those classes).
Any four-year degree program from an accredited college or uiniversity (including the University of Phoenix) is going to include substantial General Education requirements in addition to more focused study in the major discipline. Someone who has “any four-year degree” is someone who has satisfied those gen ed requirements as well as having demonstrated that they can become relatively expert in something.
The Navy has a designation “Limited Duty Officer (LDO)” by which enlisted sailors can be commissioned without having four-year degrees. I’m not sure what else is required. But as the terrm implies there are limits on how high LDOs can be promoted, etc.
My father never had a four-year degree. He enlisted in the Army at the end of WWII, then enlisted in the Navy. In 1956, he was commissioned as an Ensign, making him a ‘maverick’, and retired in 1968 as a Lieutenant. I’ve never heard of a ‘limited duty officer’.
Why the doubting? When you get to the level of “senior officers” that @LSLGuy mentioned, you’re talking about managers whose fields are necessarily strategic, and even “political” (think Eisenhower in World War II) rather than technical.
You think the staff officers drawing up the rules of engagement for U.S. forces in the eastern Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and Sea of Japan don’t keep in mind history and politics when developing something more complicated than “run or fight”?
Because my undergrad degree was in Math, but it was a BA. I took a lot of liberal arts electives. Sat in on a bunch of classes with liberal arts majors. And you know what? I got an A in every one of those courses (got an A in every one of my math courses, too—but darned if I could ever get better than a B in Chem Lab, and go figure that when I became a nuke officer they put me in charge of the engineering laboratory technicians, ie: chemists).
But somehow being a B-student with a degree in History or poli sci confers some special knowledge of “statecraft” that a STEM major like me just wouldn’t have picked up on?
Eh, everything I’ve learned about logistics and the movement of large numbers of people over great distances (never mind under fire!) seems very technical to me. Or at least, very mathematical.
Operations Research, as a field of study within mathematics, was pretty much born out of WWII.
By the time you get to Eisenhower’s level, they’re not giving you the position because your college transcript says you’re good at logistics or whatever. They’re giving you the position because you’ve already demonstrated your skill at logistics at lower levels, many times over.