The National Guard Youth ChalleNGe program is a residential, quasi-military program for youth ages 16 to 18 who are experiencing difficulty in traditional high school. The program provides classroom instruction and other structured activities to young people at 40 different sites. The focus of this report is on determining how sites can measure…

Since 2000, black representation among high-quality recruits in the Army has decreased, while Hispanic representation has increased; in the Navy, black representation has remained stable and Hispanic representation has increased. (Recruits are considered to be high-quality if they have graduated high school and score above average on the Armed…

This paper analyzes the motives for not attending college among a nationally representative sample of high school sophomores in 2002 who had not enrolled in college by the spring of 2006 (N = 2,690). It uses a latent class modeling approach to identify five classes of non-enrollees: those who are oriented toward work that does not require a…

The Air Force has long recognized the importance of selecting the most qualified officers possible. For more than 60 years, it has relied on the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test (AFOQT) as one measure of those qualifications. A variety of concerns have been raised about whether the AFOQT is biased, too expensive, or even valid for predicting…

Between 2000 and 2007, the representation of blacks among high-quality Army recruits declined, while in the Navy, black representation remained stable; the representation of Hispanics among high-quality recruits in both the Army and Navy grew during this period. RAND researchers identified factors that explain these recruiting trends and found…

Distributed learning (DL) is a key element of the Army's training strategy, and the Army has ambitious goals for expanding the future use of DL and for changing how it is developed and delivered. Program-level evaluation of DL can play an essential role in accomplishing those goals and in identifying strategic directions for the overall program.…

In 2008, the Shreveport-Bossier Community Foundation selected education, health, and poverty as funding priorities. But the foundation realized that it needed more specific guidelines on how best to distribute grants. RAND developed a framework for making investment decisions that incorporates the best of traditional decision making approaches.…