Citation/Abstract

Research suggests that military service advances social mobility for racial and ethnic minorities because of the less discriminatory environment and steady employment with generous benefits, especially GI Bill benefits for funding college education. Changes in the social and political context of military service in recent years merit a re-evaluation of claims that military service advances socioeconomic attainment for minorities. These changes include reductions in opportunity to serve resulting from the downsizing of the armed forces in the early 1990s and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have raised the costs of serving in the military relative to the benefits conferred. This dissertation asks whether the military can still be viewed as a source of social mobility for racial and ethnic minority men in light of these changes.

In the following chapters, I present three empirical analyses addressing a different facet of the broad question of whether and how military service in the post-Vietnam and post-Cold War eras contributes to socioeconomic equality and opportunity for minorities. Based on the empirical findings I conclude that military service may no longer confer the same advantages to minorities observed in prior eras. Black and Hispanic young men are no longer more likely to choose military service over college or work than their white peers, as was the case in the 1980s and 1990s. Examining the macro-level consequences of the reduction in the size of the military in the early 1990s, it appears that the loss of roughly 500,000 military jobs translated to slight increases in employment rates (on the order of 1-2 percentage points) and more substantial school enrollment rates among black men in particular (on the order of 5 percentage points). Using a field experiment to evaluate how employers respond to the signal of veterans status I find little evidence to support the contention that veteran status itself confers advantage in hiring. Given the heavy burdens of military service during wartime, the costs of doing so may now outweigh any relative benefits to military employment that may have existed in the relatively peaceful 1980s and 1990s.