COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Recruiting: No Child Left Behind
Minority Enlistment Continues to Drop: Low Entrance Exam Scores May Be Reason
Kelley Kennedy, Army Times
June 28, 2006
As
Army recruiters and marketers try to bring in more minority soldiers,
they may have hit a hurdle good advertising can’t help: low
scores on the Army entrance test.
The fiscal 2005 Army demographics report shows the number of blacks and
Hispanics enlisting in the Army dropped again — that marks the
sixth year in a downward trend for black recruits.
“The reality is that minorities are much less likely to score
high,” said Beth Asch, who specializes in military manpower
issues for Rand Corp. and wrote “What Factors Affect the Military
Enlistment of Hispanic Youth” in 2005.
“That could come from language barriers — especially with Hispanic recruits — or education issues.”
Since 1999, the number of recruits who have passed the job-skill
predictor portion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or
the Armed Forces Qualification Test, with a score in the 50th
percentile or higher has consistently gone up.
Meanwhile, Army statistics show that 40 percent of whites who take the
ASVAB score in the 50th percentile or lower, but 70 percent of
Hispanics and 74 percent of blacks score in the 50th percentile or
lower, Asch said.
The AFQT measures arithmetic reasoning, mathematics knowledge, word knowledge and paragraph comprehension.
Of course, another possible explanation for the decline in blacks
enlisting is that fewer are attempting to join the Army. Indeed,
recruiters have struggled to sign up new soldiers of all races since
the start of the Iraq war.
Asch said a youth survey by the Defense Department asked 18- to
24-year-olds if the war on terrorism was affecting their decision to
enlist.
“People always say they’re not going to join the military,
but then they do,” Asch said. “But black kids were
significantly more likely to say they’re not going to join the
military.”
But in spring 2004, the reaction to a similar question was the
opposite. Defense Human Resources conducted a survey asking 16- to
21-year-olds how likely they were to serve in the military over the
next few years. They found that 24 percent of white men thought they
would serve, 39 percent of black men said they were likely to serve and
25 percent of Hispanic men said they thought they might enlist.
And, Asch said, it’s important to remember the total percentage
of blacks in the Army — 21.6 percent in fiscal 2005 — is
still much higher than it is in the general population — 13
percent.
Asch was not surprised by the testing data, but neither are experts who
study the relation between minority demographics and achievement or
aptitude testing.
According to the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University,
black and Hispanic youths are “overrepresented in low-track
schools,” and they tend to have teachers at the “lowest
level of experience.”
Hispanic students also have much higher high school dropout rates, at
30 percent compared with 12 percent of black youths and 7 percent of
white youths.
In 2000, 23.3 percent of new enlistees were black. By 2005, that number
fell to 13.5 percent. The demographics profile began keeping tabs on
Hispanic troops in 2004, when they came in at 12.1 percent of total
recruits. In 2005, it was down to 11.7 percent.
The Defense Department mandates that at least 60 percent of soldiers
fall into categories I, II and IIIA, meaning they scored in the 50th
percentile or higher on the AFQT.
The Army has strived for 67 percent for years, Asch said, though it has
gone above and below that number. In 2003, that number hit 73 percent,
the highest it has been since 1991, when it stood at 80 percent. In
1999, only 63 percent of new recruits scored in the 50th percentile or
higher on the AFQT and, Asch said, Army Recruiting Command worked to
push the percentage back up.
“There’s ample evidence that shows those recruits [who
score in the 50 percentile or above] do well on hands-on
military-related tasks,” Asch said. “The Army had a very
high-quality mission, and it kept going up.”
In the first years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was fairly
easy to keep test scores high. But in 2005, recruiting suddenly became
harder as public opinion started going against the war in Iraq. The
Army ended the fiscal year with 67 percent having a score in the 50th
percentile or higher — a drop of 5 percentage points from 2004.
Cat IV recruits — or those with test scores between the 10th and
30th percentiles — had been capped at 2 percent of enlistees
since the 1980s. But that cap was lifted in fiscal 2005, and 4 percent
of total recruits were Cat IV. In 2004, it was was 0.6 percent.
“I think they did it to make mission and as a morale
booster,” Asch said. “It’s not so much that
they’re letting quality go to hell in a handbasket —
they’re just going back down to where they were.”
The numbers of minorities who join likely will begin going up again as
the testing restrictions loosen up to allow more recruits who score
lower than the 50th percentile on the AFQT, she said.
Army spokesman Sheldon Smith agreed with Asch’s assessment.
“We’re not lowering the standards,” he said.
“We’re returning the standards to what they were
before.”
The idea that blacks and Hispanics don’t support the war in Iraq
still plays a role in recruiting, experts say. Asch said black youths
and their parents consistently say during surveys conducted by the
military that they won’t enlist or won’t encourage their
children to enlist when asked if the war on terrorism has influenced
their perception of joining the military.
As for the idea that blacks are more likely to pay for their service with their lives — that’s a myth.
Brian Gifford studied casualties of the war in Iraq by race for the
Berkeley School of Public Health. Even though his findings went against
the conventional wisdom placing the poor and minorities on the front
line, Gifford said he was not surprised by his findings.
“Historically, African-American casualties have tended to be
low,” he said. “Overall, the casualties were distributed
among whites and Hispanics.”
During Vietnam, he said, blacks were a disproportionate number of
casualties in 1965 and 1966. But the Pentagon responded immediately by
pulling blacks back from the danger areas.
“By the end of Vietnam, their casualties looked like their representation in the ranks,” he said.
Blacks died at a rate of 21 percent in 1965 and 1966, but only 12
percent of total service members in the Marines and Army were black.
From March 19, 2003, to April 8, 2004, Gifford found that 69 percent of
those who died were white, 14 percent were black, and 11 percent were
Hispanic. During that same period, whites made up 68 percent of the
Army and Marines, blacks stood at 15 percent, and Hispanics made up
10.7 percent of the total.
Gifford said those percentages have remained stable as the war has continued.
But Gifford, a former enlisted Army infantryman, was surprised to see
how many whites and Hispanics now volunteer for the Marines and the
infantry.
“Hispanics are underrepresented in the military,” he said.
“However, within the military itself, they tend to be
overrepresented in the Marines and combat arms, which puts them in
high-risk situations.”
In 2001, one of eight blacks was in a combat-related specialty in both
services, compared to one in five whites, Gifford found. And, he said,
18 percent of all Hispanic recruits try to join the Marines.
There may be other factors at work keeping minority enlistment numbers down.
“Black enlistment has been high and overrepresented for a number
of years,” said Maggi Morehouse, a historian who has written
several books and articles about blacks in the military. “And I
have been expecting a corrective. I have been expecting black
enlistment to drop significantly below the 23 to 24 percent numbers
that represent the all-time high.”
Morehouse said there are probably a combination of reasons, including
the fact that the percentage of black, male high school graduates is
lower than that of whites, and the number of blacks going to college
— and not into the military — has increased since the 1970s.
Overall strength numbers for minority women in the officer ranks,
however, have gone up. Morehouse said that might be because
first-generation college women may be choosing ROTC as a way to pay for
their schooling. In 1998, 19.9 percent of commissioned officers were
black women, and 4.10 percent were Hispanic women. In 2005, 23 percent
of commissioned officers were black women, and 5.8 percent were
Hispanic women.
In the enlisted ranks, the number of blacks has dropped from 46.6
percent of women in 1998 to 40.1 percent in 2005, while Hispanic women
have grown in the ranks from 6.8 percent to 12.8 percent.
Asian-Americans have risen from 3.8 percent of enlisted women in 2003
to 4.6 in 2005.
The demographics report also showcased a new trend: The percentage of
prior service members enlisting in the Army has risen almost 5
percentage points.
In April 2006, Training and Doctrine Command reported that 2,456 prior
service members had enlisted under the new rule — as well as 853
non-prior service recruits.
The report, which is usually released by the end of the fiscal year,
was delayed several months this year because the Army had to recheck
the numbers.
__._,_.___
This archive consists of a topically organized selection of
articles culled by members of the Counter-Recruitment List Serve from printed
publications and web sites. The archive is not complete. We have chosen
material relevant to the work of