IMPACT OF JUNIOR RESERVE OFFICERS' TRAINING CORPS ON THE QUANTITY OF ENLISTMENTS

Abstract

The Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps mission is to improve the citizenship of its students, and it achieves its mission by providing leadership and military skills to our nation’s youth. However, the Army wants to create a more holistic approach to determine additional benefits that the JROTC program may provide. To meet this requirement, we investigate a potential ancillary benefit in understanding the JROTC program’s effect on the quantity of enlistments. We collect demographic, economic, geographic, enlistment, and other data from primarily publicly available United States government agencies at the ZIP Code Tabulation Areas level. We focus our analysis using multiple regression techniques to investigate the potential impacts of a JROTC program on enlistments in ZIP codes, or ZCTAs, and their surrounding areas. We find that there is a positive association between the proximity to a JROTC program and the number of enlistments; however, the larger effects occur in the interactions among the JROTC distance factor, veteran population percentage, and 18- to 24-year-old population size. The combination of higher veteran rates and having a JROTC within a ZIP code is considerably more impactful than the individual factor benefits alone. Additionally, we predict the net improvement associated with establishing a new JROTC in ZIP codes to identify the ZIP codes that are best in terms of increasing the number of enlistments.