Article One

COMMITTEE for
COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT

Who We Are

Articles

Articles: Military Recruiting: Personnel Crunch

Army recruits with diploma ratio drops

United Press International

Dec. 27, 2006

The number of U.S. Army recruits with regular
high school diplomas dipped below Defense Department standards in 2005 and
fell again in 2006.

The National Priorities Project, a non-profit social justice advocacy group
in Northampton, Mass., obtained Army recruiting standards data through a
Freedom of Information Act request.

According to NPP, in 2005 the percentage of diploma-earning U.S. recruits
was 83.5 percent, 6.5 percent below the Defense Department goal of having
90 percent of recruits from that "tier 1" designation.

The percentage of high school diploma earners among new recruits dropped
again in 2006 to 73.1 percent. It fell in every state except North Dakota,
where it rose from 79.6 from 79.5 last year. Not a single state's recruits
met the 90 percent diploma rate in 2006. In 2005, Nebraska's recruits were
the only ones to meet the target, with 90.6 diploma earners. That number
dropped to 83.9 percent in 2006.

The lowest percentage of diploma earners among recruits came from Nevada,
where just 56 percent of its 577 recruits earned regular high school
diplomas. That was a significant drop from 2005 when 80.6 percent of
Nevada's recruits had diplomas.

Other low diploma recruiting states include Oregon, with 63.3 percent of
its 943 recruits having diplomas, down from 77.6 percent in 2005; Utah,
with 63.9 percent of its 396 recruits having earned diplomas, down from
82.3 percent; and Mississippi, with 64.8 percent of its 582 recruits having
diplomas, down from 68.9 percent in 2005.

The Army had a difficult recruiting year in 2005, falling some 7,000
recruits short. It met its goals in 2006 after significantly increased
spending on recruiting advertising and bonues.

The conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., published a study
in 2003 that showed if high school equivalency is figured into the data,
Army recruits had on the whole more education than the national average.
According to the study, 98 percent were high school graduates or higher,
compared to 75 percent of the general population.

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 Eugene, Oregon’s Committee for Countering Military Recruitment that we think may be of use to others individuals and groups with similar goals.

Because our web site is public, personal comments about the articles and (frequent) corrections of reporters’ errors are also not included. If an article interests you, we encourage you to return to the Counter-Recruitment List Serve and put the article’s headline into the search line, which should bring up (often wise and useful) commentary and corrections. If you do not belong to the List Serve, it can be found at counter-recruitment@yahoogroups.com

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the articles on this site are posted without profit to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposed.