Two-Year Colleges and Vocational Schools as Sources of Military Manpower

This study examines the recruiting potential of two-year colleges and postsecondary vocational schools as a means for meeting the military's needs for nonprior service high school graduates in the next decade. The authors found that these institutions contain sufficiently large numbers of men of enlistment age to make them an attractive recruiting market, and that the majority of their students are potentially "high-quality" enlistees. Their findings also indicated, however, that in systematic attempts to recruit from these institutions, the military has not substantially increased enlistment rates; that there do not appear to be "hot spots" across the nation in which recruiting from these institutions has been particularly successful; and that special (and potentially more costly) incentives and recruiting tactics may be needed to increase enlistment rates. The authors conclude that these institutions are far too important as sources of accessions to be ignored, and recommend collecting additional information to determine whether the quality of enlistees from postsecondary educational institutions warrants the comparatively higher costs of recruiting them.