Recruiting Older Youths: Insights from a New Survey of Army Recruits

This report aims to improve understanding of the enlistment decisions of older recruits, those who did not join the Army right after high school assumedly those older than 20 years of age when they enlisted. Since the advent of the all-volunteer force, much attention has been paid to the behavior of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Rostker, Bernard D, Klerman, Jacob A, Zander-Cotugno, Megan
Format: Report
Language:English
Subjects:
APTITUDE TESTS
DATA ACQUISITION
DECISION MAKING
DEMOGRAPHY
EDUCATION
FAMILIES(HUMAN)
LESSONS LEARNED
Military Forces and Organizations
MILITARY FORCES(UNITED STATES)
OLDER YOUTHS
Personnel Management and Labor Relations
QUESTIONNAIRES
RACE(ANTHROPOLOGY)
RECRUITING
Sociology and Law
YOUTH
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Summary:This report aims to improve understanding of the enlistment decisions of older recruits, those who did not join the Army right after high school assumedly those older than 20 years of age when they enlisted. Since the advent of the all-volunteer force, much attention has been paid to the behavior of young men and women and the decision process that leads them to decide to enlist or to follow a different path after high school. For most of this period, the Youth Attitude Tracking Survey has provided information about such things as the propensity of young men and women to join the military. Today, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness surveys young men and women ages 16 through 21, but little is known about older youths and why they join the military. There has been very little research on older recruits, who made up 48 percent of recruits across all components and services in 2009. This represents a significant part of all recruits. As a group, they had rejected the idea of serving in the military when they graduated high school but changed their minds and have now decided to join. Surveying 5,000 Army recruits between 2009 and 2010, we found that, as a group, those who decided to join after trying the world of work had fared less well in the civilian world than had their general population cohort since leaving high school. We argue that this translated into a perception that they faced poor civilian opportunities. We also found that influential individuals who had earlier recommended against joining had, in a substantial fraction of cases, changed their minds. These findings and the research presented here should be of interest to those charged with recruiting for the Army and for the other military components.