I just felt like it's somewhat dishonest to bring up the military in conversations about college funding without some reference to the fact that the military is an organization created to inflict death and injury and control by force (I realize not every job directly relates to this, and I don't think that matters). It's a deeply ideological choice, and it was being portrayed as a financial/educational one and that bothered me. That's all.
Whew, thank goodness that's not an issue with corporate scholarships or professional-association scholarships or alumni scholarships.
Or maybe the only difference is that those other groups don't have legislative & executive charters to inflict death and injury and forceful control. They just have to hope that they don't get caught breaking the law. Or American law, anyway. At least not in America.
Is there an ideological choice that will deliver financial & educational support to someone whose only other option may appear to be student loans? Or does the military come up so often because the military recruiters perhaps do a better job of marketing their benefits?
Maybe the Peace Corps could really raise their game if they paid for more mechanical engineering and agricultural tech degrees.
By the way, when a recruit joins the military and reports for initial training it's made very clear to them that their job is to break things and kill people. No dishonesty involved-- it wastes too much training time and costs too much taxpayer money. We veterans might not have known precisely what we were getting into, but we all knew that it was better than the status quo ante.
As for the military option -- I personally wouldn't choose to go that route (reformed vegetarian here), but I wouldn't discourage my son to do it if he wanted and worked in a highly technical field. Not all college military programs funnel kids into combat.
I don't know the details, but I'm going to guess that college ROTC programs tend to push kids into technical positions, where they'll use their college degree. A friend of mine had his undergraduate, Master's, and PhD (in rocket science!) covered by the military because they wanted his brains more than his brawn.
That's a huge debate in the military, let alone society. After centuries of trying to quantify what makes a leader, it's very difficult to pick them out of a crowd of high-school or college graduates. We just fling a bunch of volunteers into the jobs with some basic training and hope that Darwinism helps produce a solution. I guess it's the ultimate in survivor bias.
The military can hire all the contractor rocket scientists they need (and almost as many as they want) but it's really hard to hire leaders. You can't take the teens with the highest GPAs and SATs and turn them into leaders. Ironically there are many officers who have GEDs and SATs in the low four digits and went to community colleges for liberal arts degrees and turned out to be fantastic leaders. It's a cliché, but leaders are either born that way or discovered through combat.
Most of the ROTC scholarships are awarded in the "Tier 1" and "Tier 2" levels for engineering & science. The logic is that the combat arms jobs (the fightin' parts) tend to use highly technical tools. The officers won't need to be able to operate those tools blindfolded, but they'd better understand their strengths & weaknesses in helping with decisions. Maybe this logic is correct, but it still leaves a lot of potential standing on the sidelines.
A minority of the scholarships are awarded to "everyone else", mostly language programs and business programs but also history and economics and even philosophy. Those people turn out to have critical thinking skills that will pay off for the military even if they haven't studied multivariable calculus. Their critical-thinking skills are borne out through the training pipeline-- if they survive it then they have the skills. If they don't then they didn't.
In the 1980s, Admiral Rickover succeeded in bullying the Naval Academy to set a quota on their degrees. 80% had to be a technical degree, and 20% could be "non-technical"-- yet even the history and English and econ majors had to study electricity, electronics, thermodynamics, and weapons systems. Now that Rickover is no longer terrorizing the Navy, USNA has come to its senses and backed off the quota system. However it's still very difficult to get in without a high all-around multiple.
After decades of data analysis, the single most successful indicator of success at a service academy is: Eagle Scout or the Gold Award. Or at least it is for those graduates who actually were in a scouting program.
As for the brawn... that went out in the 1700s when firearms became operational. Even the SEALs and the Special Forces have qualifying tests that are fairly achievable for athletic young adults. (Of both genders, although admittedly pullups are both a genetic and a learned skill.) All of the special forces promise to develop more muscle and stamina, and the ones who do better will have a metabolism that can rapidly convert food to energy while avoiding repetitive stress injuries. But what the special forces are really seeking is competitive persistence. They want the scrappy little underdog who just can't stop competing at everything (even the stupid things) and who won't give up until he (or she) literally loses consciousness. With that, everything else is training. Without that, everything else is a waste of time.
Submariners spend a lot of operational time with SEALs. The rest of the Navy thinks that submariners are intense, but the submariners know what intense really looks like-- and the SEALs scare the heck out of us. Nice guys and great leaders, but... yikes.
From a purely Mustachian perspective: 100% free college education, insanely low cost of living due to deploying frequently, tax free money, and a paycheck of about $150k at your 5 year point, lol.
With great coffee and free movies, too!