An analysis and development of a production predictor model for the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps program.

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to examine and model the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) commissioning process in terms of several possible explanatory variables. Each of the variables, which included unemployment rate, average yearly college tuition, ROTC enrollment by class, advertising budget, scholarship program and propensity towards military service, were analyzed for trends in the data with respect to the dependent variable, the number of second lieutenants commissioned in a year. Four regression models were fitted to numerous combinations of the explanatory variables and the dependent variable. Three variables were found to be significant and possess the potential to predict the number of second lieutenants commissioned each year within the range of the data used for modeling.