The Effect of High School JROTC on Student Achievement, Educational Attainment, and Enlistment

[Author Affiliation]Elda Pema, Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, 555 Dyer Road, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943, U.S.A.; E-mail epema@nps.edu, corresponding author.Stephen Mehay, Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, 555 Dyer Road, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA 93943, U.S.A.; E-mail smehay@nps.edu[Acknowledgment]We thank the editor (Christopher Bollinger), David Neumark, Barry Hirsch, Alice Crawford, Linda Bailey, Dahlia Remler, Yu-Chu Shen, seminar participants at Baruch College/City University of New York and at the 2005 and 2008 Western Economic Association conferences, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. Yee-Ling Ang and Janet Days provided research assistance.1. IntroductionThe Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) is a program for high school students funded jointly by local school districts and the federal government. The national program was established in 1916; although, individual programs date as far back as 1874. The program remained small until a major expansion was launched in the mid-1990s. By 2007 the JROTC program enrolled roughly 525,000 students in 3400 high schools.1The JROTC program is of interest to policy makers for several reasons. First, although it has elements of a military preparation program, its goals are multidimensional and include improving academic outcomes for high school students.2 Understanding the program's effects on student achievement is especially important given the heavy enrollment of at-risk students: Nearly 40% of the high schools that offer JROTC are located in inner-city areas, and about one-half of enrollees are minorities. Another indicator of program diversity is that about 40% of enrollees are females. In addition, the program accepts many students who could not qualify for military enlistment (Coumbe, Kotakis, and Gammell 2008). These enrollment patterns in part explain why most students who participate in JROTC do not enter the military (about 70% in our data).3 From a social cost-benefit perspective, it is important to understand the full array of program impacts, including effects on both cognitive and noncognitive outcomes as well as on employment in the military.A broader public policy issue revolves around the value of offering JROTC in public schools, which has been the subject of ongoing debate. Proponents argue that the program improves both the cognitive and noncognitive skills of participants. President George H. Bush described JROTC as a "... program that boosts high school completion rates, reduces drug use, and raises self-esteem..." (cited in Corbett and Coumbe 2001, p. 40). JROTC includes elements that are similar to better-known high school initiatives, such as career academies and school-to-work (STW) programs. Some JROTC activities are comparable with other extracurricular high school activities, such as band, team sports, or school clubs, and many participants engage in community service after school and on weekends. Critics often oppose JROTC in public schools for philosophical reasons but also on the grounds that there is no evidence that the program improves academic achievement (Lutz and Bartlett 1995).The opponents are correct about the lack of research on JROTC. To date no analysis has attempted to assess the wider effects of the program using nationally representative data. This study evaluates the impacts of JROTC on a broad list of student outcomes, including in-school and post-school performance, based on data from High School and Beyond (HSB) and the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS). We obtain estimates using a variety of techniques to control for the selection of individuals and schools into the program. Overall, we find mixed program effects on educational outcomes. While JROTC participants in general have poorer academic performance, the program appears to reduce dropout rates and improve graduation rates for black participants and self-esteem scores for female participants. …