Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (NJROTC): The Impact of NJROTC Participation on Naval Accessions and Retentions
Officially, the Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps' (NJROTC) mission is to educate high school students on the value of citizenship, public service, and personal responsibility. Since 1916, proponents and opponents have debated the value of the various Junior ROTC programs; however, there has been little empirical research that describes the extent to which these programs have actually benefited the services. As such, the purpose of this study was to examine the NJROTC program by analyzing the impact program participation has on Navy accessions and retentions from 2001 to 2005. The methodology used in this study was an exclusively quantitative analysis of pre-existing data from two large population databases: The Navy JROTC Unit Management System, which included career intent information on 39,745 NJROTC graduates from 2001 to 2005; the other database, from the Defense Management Data Center, provided demographic data on 211,076 Navy accessions from 2001 to 2005. Analysis of these databases revealed that NJROTC graduates' intent to join the military clearly benefits the Navy as a resource for recruiting; specifically, while there were small but positive differences in Naval accessions for most NJROTC participants, there were larger positive differences for women and African-American participants. In the final part of the analysis, a binary logistic regression model was created analyzing retention among several predictor variables; results indicated that the primary predictor variable, NJROTC accessions, were 45 percent more likely to be retained than non-NJROTC accessions after holding all other predictor variables constant. Taken together, the findings of this study have demonstrated that during the 2001–2005 period, NJROTC operated as both a citizenship training program and a source of recruiting for the Navy. As such, there are a number of recommendations for further research; the first, and perhaps most immediate would be for the Navy to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to determine geographically where it makes sense to grant full participation to the 198 schools on the waiting list; the second, and perhaps most important, would involve survey research that targets NJROTC stakeholders to find out what the response would be if the Navy openly declared NJROTC as a recruiting tool.
citizenship training program, management system, Naval accessions and retentions, Navy Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps--NJROTC, quantitative, Leadership Studies
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