USA Today passes along an extremely interesting economic indicator for the young adult labor markets:
The Army is nearly 14% short of the recruits it will need to fill its ranks, marking the first time in six years — and only the third in the last 20 — that it may fall short of its recruiting goal for the year….
And recruiters are working harder just to get potential soldiers to meet with them.
For the first 10 months of fiscal year 2015, recruiters made more than 415,000 appointments with young men and women interested in the Army. Those resulted in just over 50,000 signing up to serve. For the same period in 2014, they made 371,000 appointments and had signed up 52,000 soldiers…..
Moreover, the quality of recruits has remained high, Snow said. There has been a decrease in the percentage of recruits who have received waivers for failing to meet educational or other standards.
In 2005, the Pentagon relaxed standards for recruits who fared poorly on standard military exams. Those who scored in the lower third of the test, so-called Category Four recruits — had been limited to 2% of recruits. The relaxed standard allowed 4% of those recruits, and even that was exceeded at times. Less than 1% of recruits this year belong in Category Four…..
The US military wants to recruit from the 18 to 20 year population of adults who mostly have their shit together. They want to recruit high school graduates who have never been in trouble with the law and who have decent options outside of the military. Reasonably smart recruits are a bit more expensive to recruit than the knuckle heads and idiots but they tend to perform a hell of a lot better when making or preventing very expensive things from going boom.
During the Iraq Occupation, recruiting was a massive problem. The US Army faced its recruiting shortfall by a combination of throwing money at the problem and dropping standards dramatically. The Army was taking in soldiers and sending them to Iraq that in a non-recruiting crisis mode, they would never have offered an enlistment contract. That is not the case now. Instead, young adults who have options besides the Army are taking those options which is a decent indicator that the young adult job market is half decent if those other options are better than a peace time army where the odds of being shot at are far lower today than they were three, five or seven years ago.
srv
I’ve met several kids who are waiting until Obama won’t be their CinC.
NorthLeft12
Not sure that these new recruits are as intelligent as their test scores indicate. Anyone who knows US history, especially the last thirty odd years, should understand that a war of choice is just around the corner. Just because there is not a foreign war now…………
I guess the standard military exam is not big on US history or whatever is taught in the high schools these days.
Mike in NC
@srv: Recruiters scraping the bottom of the barrel would have passed you over.
Shygetz
I think it’s important to note, too…many young people I talk to do not believe there is any such thing as a peace-time Army in the US anymore. (Disclaimer–the young people I tend to talk to are college student undergrads, and are not representative of the entire recruitment pool).
WereBear
I know a TON of kids who have chosen the military over dead-end, low wage jobs. This gets them out of the small town they grew up in, pays for college if they want to go, gives them skills (they hope) and offers travel and adventure they could never hope to pay for themselves.
I’ve long thought there should be MORE Job Corp offered to our young people. I would never make it through even Air Force basic training, but I’d have been fine in something that isn’t designed to keep me alive in a war zone, know what I mean?
Linda Featheringill
@Shygetz:
These young people might be correct.
Actually, I think that joining the Army has for a long time been the option of last resort for many poor young people. The current recruitment problems might indicate that the young people in question have other, more attractive options.
Linda Featheringill
@WereBear:
Domestic service would be a good investment for the entire country.
WereBear
@Linda Featheringill: Absolutely! Invest in our population! The payoff is HUGE.
p.a.
Hi RM. The contact link in BJ doesn’t work for me, so I hope you don’t mind if I ask a question here. In a strike, do my brother current Vz employees (I retired in Feb 2015) have any med options beside Cobra? Vz is using the same law firm to negotiate that Fairpoint just used during a 4 month strike. Could there be other options for dependent children, spouses?
Bex
@srv: So they’re waiting for war-on-the-first-day Walker?
scott (the other one)
@srv: I believe you’ve met several kids who claim that. I don’t believe for a moment they’re really going to enlist after Obama’s out of office. Please to report back in February 2017.
Kay
I went to a really nice “graduation” ceremony at the local community college yesterday. They were getting the entry-level cert for advanced manufacturing. It was a 9 month program, funded by the US Dept of Labor. Every one of them had a job offer except for the much older guy. My middle son was one of them.
I have to say though, the MC of the thing, the community college program director, directed his entire address to what employers need in employees. It was all about how they had to prove their worth every day and they could basically neither expect nor demand anything from their employer. I wish people would stop doing this. Employees offer value and benefits to employers. This is a two way street. A job is a transaction, not a gift from the employer. I don’t know when we all adopted this freaking groveling attitude but I don’t think it’s good to indoctrinate young people into it. I felt like telling them “and you! you have to get something out of this deal too!”
WereBear
It must have been hard to sit there quietly.
The bosses who are all “I can replace you with a trained monkey!” are the ones who wind up with asshole employees who cost them money and drive away customers.
john fremont
@srv: So if they get a commanding officer, general or heck a company first sergeant they can’take stand what are going to do then? These guys sound like they have a problem with authority.
boatboy_srq
@Kay: The MCs attitude is, alas, all too common among “job creators”. Here’s your svcky job: be thankful you’ve got it for another day and don’t bother me about little things like living wages or vacation or health insurance or anything like that. It’s like it’s branded into their consciousness somehow that employees should STFU and get back to work. I’ve lost track of the management types I’ve run into that have this mindset.
Kay
@WereBear:
I think they’re almost programmed to say it at community colleges because they have fully accepted the job training role – that’s why they get the grants. There’s nothing wrong with job training but I don’t see any reason to present this transaction as some kind of generous gift from the employer. The whole point of the federal government funding the program was employers were bitching incessantly that they needed these people. Now that the public picked up the cost of training their employees we’re back to “job creators rule!”
They can’t win, these young people. They’re in demand and they’re still told not to expect anything from employers.
Ben
@Linda Featheringill:
This was a plank in Kerry’s platform back in ’04. Not sure if it was part of O’s platform…
Richard Mayhew
@p.a.: Hit me up at B(alloon) J(juice) (4 letter nickname for Richard that starts with “D”) Mayhew @ Yahoo with DOT Community with more details as I will need to know more before I can intelligently respond.
NorthLeft12
@WereBear: I can’t agree with this more. I have worked with more than a few managers who had this view of highly trained chemical plant operators. The good ones left as soon as they found a better company to work for which left the plant in the hands of guys who I would barely trust to pump gas let alone a potentially dangerous and complex facility.
I was an Engineer there but left as soon as I found a better company. I took a 10% pay cut but it was worth it.
My old company was shut down in a few years due to the incompetent management and ownership. So good news is sometimes the free market does work to weed out the idiots.
RaflW
@scott (the other one): Yes, this. srv knows some bragging idiot kids who say they won’t serve Obama (or their country, but that’s too subtle a point for them). Then in two years, oops, too old to join, found a job, gotta wifey. Cowards who blame Obama, that’s srv’s crowd.
m.j.
This is neither here nor there, but my brother once took a kid to the Marine recruitment office to see about signing up. The sales pitch was a bit odd. The recruiter had a book. The book told the story of famous Marines. The recruiter said that Mr. Rogers was a Marine sniper with many kills and he wore a sweater because he had Tattoos up and down both arms. Apparently, Captain Kangaroo and Lee Marvin stormed the beaches at Guadalcanal.
Marvin did serve, but I believe he was wounded at Saipan.
Bob Keeshan served but enlisted too late to see any action.
Fred Rogers never served in any branch of the military.
Strange.
gratuitous
That whole “you’ll never amount to much in this podunk town, join the military and get a good education for free” pitch was relentlessly drilled into my grandson, and now he’s living the high life in a stateside post. Just kidding. But he has another three years to ponder his situation in life, and hopefully the next president will resist committing crimes against humanity and he can get out with a full skin.