Lower Education
Conscription pulls young people away from education, delaying their academic pursuits and reducing overall educational attainment. The loss of talent hurts the economy and society’s long-term intellectual capital.
Conscription distorts the pursuit of education
Military service can be quite a disruptor for the pursuit of education by the youth. The recognition of said fact can be found in the very policy of many states. Worried by the risk of stifling education prospects the merciful rulers often create exemptions from military service for those enrolled in universities. An academic endeavour helped many avoid the fate of inhaling Agent Orange in the jungles of Vietnam. Still, other countries offer little flexibility when demanding sacrifice from young men or only allow them to defer military service. A pincer movement occurs in this regard, where the introduction of conscription harms education, whichever option is chosen.
On one hand, conscripting all men indifferently to their educational aspirations is an utter waste of human potential. The state squanders the precious time of an Oxbridge graduate on army training, fit for the lowest common denominator of all men in terms of intellectual potential. A brilliant architect wastes his talent on guard duty. A molecular physicist finds himself bored to death in the infantry. An evolutionary biologist is forced to observe the latest specimens of humanity from the inside of a tank.
On the other hand, exempting education unleashes the gate for draft dodgers to flood the universities with applications for the sole purpose of evading conscription. No matter how the policy is structured, one ends up outside the education equilibrium, when conscription is the chosen policy.
Why are educational outcomes so thoroughly gutted by indiscriminate conscription? It is simple: drafting young men into the military creates a prolonged period of dependency on their families, stalling any momentum toward self-sufficiency. Picture this: a young man, ripped from the formative years of building his future, earns next to nothing during compulsory service. His family is forced to support him for an extra year at a time when they could be supporting his education, career ambitions, or whatever pathway to independence he would choose.
When the military service wraps up, the clock has already run down. Many of these young men have exhausted the well of parental support and must dive straight into full-time work. No grace period, and no time to get their bearings. Just a forced sprint toward survival. Others will start a bachelor’s degree but find themselves cut off when it comes to further study, they can no longer afford pursuing master’s or specialized skills, because that fleeting window of opportunity has closed. Conscription afflicts men during the ages when most human capital accumulation occurs be that education, work experience, vocational training, or education. It interrupts or postpones the most key skill acquisition for the rest of the life.
At the same time, conscription diminishes human capital, as academic skills acquired before military service will depreciate when left idle during active duty. State-mandated career interruption means a foregone experience in the labour market and skill atrophy. A forced career halt will be particularly disastrous for men in fast-paced and shifting industries. Conscripts will also end up entering the labour market later than graduates who have not been drafted. They will end up spending less time reaping the returns on educational investments until they are forced to retire.
The above-mentioned mechanisms in play wreak havoc on education in OECD countries. A study of 22 nations finds that
“While the enrolment rate increased considerably everywhere, countries with conscription exhibit consistently lower rates of higher education enrolment (the difference amounted to more than 15 percentage points in the mid-1990s)”
Of highest importance for just how disastrous it will be is the intensity of its enforcement. When conscripts are a high share of the labour force and spend a huge time in military service, enrolment in higher education is significantly reduced. A decrease in the duration of military conscription by eight months or of the conscript share by one percent of the population would increase post-secondary education by at least 8 and 15 percent, respectively. In the UK compulsory military service decreased the probability of being enrolled in school at the age of 18 by between 2 and 4 percentage points. In the Netherlands, the system of military conscription caused a reduction of university education completion from 12.3 to 10.8 percent. Conscription simply harms the study prospects of those who most certainly should seek career advancement in universities.
On the other hand, conscription often fuels education, of those who should abstain from it. While overeducation may sound nice to the ignorant, in reality, it is a waste of precious resources in the economy. As prof. Bryan Caplan puts it.
“Typical students burn thousands of hours studying material that neither raises their productivity nor enriches their lives.”
University exemptions from conscription mass-produce unnecessary college degrees, that would never be pursued otherwise, and thus for sure have insufficient utility to the student, except as a golden ticket out of military drudgery.
In France, researchers found a significant drop in the number of men seeking higher degrees after conscription was ended. Before abolition, many young men sought postponing their service and doing studies, because the more educated conscripts had access to higher responsibilities and milder forms of service. And if one stayed in education till the age of 26 one could potentially avoid service altogether. Finally, France was abundant with low-cost educational institutions of all sorts, financed from the taxpayer’s dime. The French government simply created all the wrong incentives to seek higher education. The waste of unnecessary degrees was the most rampant among those in the middle and upper classes. The most interesting here is that studies found that
“while mandatory conscription significantly increases years of education, it does not increase the likelihood of receiving a degree at the high school or college level.”
The university enrolment boost then is pure fiction and an utter loss for the one paying, be that the public or the individual himself, so much so that they don’t even bother to complete the unnecessary degree.
In post-war Germany, the same mechanism was at play. When conscription was introduced in 1956, the induced spike in the probability of pursuing a university education was from 9 to 15 percentage points. The authors of the study posit that in addition to draft-dodging another mechanism might be at play.
“Human capital (…) tends to depreciate while on active duty. Replacing lost human capital requires additional education on the part of the former conscript. Having already finished secondary education, the next logical step would be to enter a higher educational institution, where human capital can be re-acquired”.
Yet another bleak consequence of conscription.
Similar process occurred in the case of the US draft to Vietnam. Research suggests that:
“draft avoidance raised enrolment at ages 20 –21 by about 6.5 percentage points for men in the 1947 cohort, raised the fraction with some college by about 4 percentage points, and raised the fraction with a college degree by just over 2 percentage points”
Once again the same pattern is visible here as in France. As the threat of getting drafted goes away, the previously eager-to-study men, abandon their degrees in staggering numbers with less than 33% of follow-through on their studies.
The two-pronged destruction of education by conscription comes in full force, once compulsion enters the equation and one-size-fits-all rules are decreed on the entire population.
Explore the evidence
Does Military Draft Discourage Enrollment in Higher Education? Evidence from OECD Countries.
Long-term effects of conscription: lessons from the UK
The Long-Term Effects of Military Conscription on Educational Attainment and Wages.
Demand for Education and Labor Market Outcomes: Lessons from the Abolition of Compulsory Conscription in France
Conscription and the Returns to Education: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity
Do Guns Displace Books? – The Impact of Compulsory Military Service on Educational Attainment
