# 99051. DoD Evaluating Recruits with Alternative Diplomas

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By Staff Sgt. Alicia K. Borlik, USA
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON -- Each of the military services can now annually 
enlist 2,500 more individuals with certain alternative diplomas 
under a five-year DoD pilot program that began Oct. 1.

The DoD program allows the services to recruit more home-
schooled graduates and more general education development 
certificate holders from the National Guard Youth Challenge 
Program each year. The Guard program helps young high school 
dropouts earn a GED and qualify to enlist.

During the program, DoD will count these enlistees as if they 
are high school diploma graduates, said Air Force Col. James R. 
Holaday, deputy director for accession policy in the Office of 
the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Management Policy. 
With their new status, home-schoolers and GED holders in the 
program qualify for the educational incentives and enlistment 
bonuses offered traditional diploma grads, he said.

Each service offers the Montgomery GI Bill, other educational 
incentives and enlistment bonuses of up to $12,000 for certain 
job specialties, Holaday added. 

One standing DoD goal has been for at least 90 percent of its 
recruits to be high school diploma graduates. Holaday said all 
GED holders and home-schooled graduates previously were included 
in the remaining 10 percent -- and non-Youth Challenge GED 
holders still are. 

He said program participants must still fully qualify to enlist 
and emphasized the department hasn't lowered its aptitude or 
other quality standards. For instance, he noted, DoD hasn't 
changed its benchmark on the percentage of recruits who score in 
the top half on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, a subset of 
the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. 

"We ask the services to recruit at least 60 percent of their new 
recruits from those scoring in the upper half of the test -- 
they recruited 68 percent in 1998," he said. DoD also limits to 
4 percent the recruits who score in the lowest acceptable 
category -- roughly the bottom third of all American youth. For 
the last eight years, Holaday said, less than 1 percent of the 
services' recruits came from this category.

He said DoD officials believe home-schooled students are a new 
market of recruitable individuals. "We have not had enough home-
schooled recruits to analyze how they perform," he added, "but 
we have people in our service academies who were home-schooled 
and they are doing very well." DoD hopes to attract enough 
alternative diploma holders so it can analyze reliably how well 
they perform.

The Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded think tank, 
will collect and analyze program data. It will also estimate the 
number of home-schooled graduates in the youth population and 
develop ways to identify them for recruitment.

The pilot program ends Sept. 30, 2003. By Feb. 1, 2004, the 
defense secretary will report to Congress the data comparing 
alternative diploma enlistees and traditional high school 
graduates in the areas of attrition, discipline, adaptability to 
military life, aptitude for mastering skills necessary for 
technical specialties and re-enlistment.

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