GENERAL INTELLECTUAL ACHIEVEMENT, ENLISTMENT INTENTIONS, AND RACIAL REPRESENTATIVENESS IN THE UNITED-STATES MILITARY

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 sam ple of young men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article examines the effects of four different specifications of the i ndependent variables race, poverty status, high school enrollment, age , and test score on an individual's enlistment intentions. The coeffic ient estimates were maximum likelihood estimates of a logistic regress ion 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 f alse importance to the effects of race on intentions to enlist.