General Intellectual Achievement, Enlistment Intentions, and Racial Representativeness in the U.S. Military

Abstract

Debates about the racial representativeness of the U.S. military often fail to consider whether the racial composition of those who want to join the military reflects that of the general population. Using a sample of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article examines the effects of four different specifications of the independent variables race, poverty status, high school enrollment, age, and test score on an individual's enlistment intentions. The coefficient estimates were maximum likelihood estimates of a logistic regression model with an ordinal dependent variable. The results suggest that enlistment intentions depend heavily on intellectual achievement and poverty as well as race, and that models ignoring this may attribute false importance to the effects of race on intentions to enlist.