Coffee Party USA

There are many reasons to join the military, but one of the most enticing is education. Indeed, a 2017 poll conducted by the Department of Defense found that 49% of Army recruits signed up to pay for their education. It makes sense. Military education packages are incredibly attractive, which is quite the recruitment carrot. For a huge number of recruits, joining the military means finding a way to pay for school they couldn’t otherwise afford. That may say less about the luster of military benefits and more about a problem in our public policy. As education scholar William Ayers wrote back in 2006, as recruitment fell short of quotas, “High schools have thus become battlefields for the hearts and minds of young people…recruiters dangle gifts and promises of future benefits before teenagers in an effort to fill the ranks of an all-volunteer military.” Is our country making it hard to get an education on purpose?

Some critics suggest military recruitment strategies have sought to weaponize poverty. By the 1980s, the term "poverty draft" had gained traction, articulating the idea that the enlisted ranks of the military were composed of young people with limited economic opportunities. There is speculation that the Pentagon even embraced programs like No Child Left Behind as part of a broader strategy to improve recruitment by targeting low-income youth. Though these may be cynical perspectives on a simple matter of correlation, it does appear that the military struggles to draw youth to join the ranks whenever more attractive alternative economic pathways emerge. After a long recruitment drought, last year’s numbers finally climbed, but Army officials link it to “a higher unemployment rate among people aged 16 to 24…” In other words, if the economy is depressed enough, as long as the military is one of the few employers still hiring, a recruitment drought won’t be so obvious.