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This article examines trends and relationships involving high school seniors' military service plans, their college plans, and their actual entry into military service. Crosssectional and longitudinal data from the Monitoring the Future project show that, although individuals planning to complete college are less likely than average to plan on military service, the upward trend in college plans cannot account for many of the yearto-year changes in military propensity. Moreover, it now appears that the majority of young men expecting to enter military service also expect to complete a four-year college program. Most important, planning for college does not reduce enlistment rates among high propensity males, although for some of them it may delay entry by several years. These findings suggest that educational incentives for military service are now particularly important, given the high proportions of potential recruits with college aspirations.

Recent reports have again raised questions about military culture and civil-military differences. This article examines panel data from the Monitoring the Future project's nationally representative samples of young men from the high school classes of 1976-1995. The study compares military recruits with their high school classmates who entered college or full-time employment, using "before-and-after" measures obtained during the senior year of high school and one or two years later. The largest disparities involved servicemen's preferences for greater military spending, and they reflected both selection (differences existing before the end of high school) and socialization (increased differences after enlistment). Servicemen were also more likely than civilian men to support greater military influence in the U.S. and were slightly more willing than their age-mates to employ U.S. military force; both reflect selection effects, with no consistent evidence of socialization. On the whole, these patterns of military attitudes have changed very little across the two decades studied.

Data from the Monitoring the Future project, a study of high school seniors (and since 1991, eighth and tenth graders) are used to define six recruitment periods in America's all-volunteer military force, characterized by variations in entry-level pay, recruiting resources, educational benefit programs available, the recruiting environment, and recruit quality. Propensity to enlist is shown to drop between the eighth and the twelfth grades, and between 1991 and 1997 at each grade level studied. Propensity is also shown to have varied between 1976 and 1997 by gender, race, and college plans

This article examines how high school seniors' plans or "propensity" to serve in the armed forces relate to their actual enlistment. Longitudinal data were used from more than M 33.000 participants in the Monitoring the Future Project's nationally representative samples from the high school classes of 1976-1991; however, primary attention was focused on the more recent classes (1984-1991). Men's expectations at the end of high school predicted their entrance into military service just about as accurately as they predicted entrance into college. Among those men who "definitely" expected to enlist, fully 70 percent did so within five or six years; however, among, those who "probably" expected to enlist, only 29 percent did so; and among all other men, under 10 percent enlisted. Compared with men, far fewer women expected to enlist, and they were only half as likely actually to do so. These findings show far higher correlations between plans and enlistment than have been found in previous studies using other samples.

Does success in school protect teenagers from drug use? Does drug use impair scholastic success? This book tackles a key issue in adolescent development and health - the education-drug use connection. The authors examine the links and likely causal connections between educational experiences, delinquent behavior, and adolescent use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine.The book uses data from the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future project. It focuses on a large and nationally representative sample of 8th grade students in the United States who were initially surveyed in 1991-