The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) is a high school initiative that serves many at-risk students. Its goals range from reducing dropout rates and improving academic achievement to preparing students for military careers. Using data from High School and Beyond (HSB) and the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), we estimate average treatment effects on students attending schools that typically host JROTC. Applying a twostage matching technique, we find that JROTC participants have poorer academic outcomes than other students; although, a large portion of these differences is explained by their at-risk status. In addition, program effects appear to differ by demographic group, with black participants having lower dropout rates than white participants. The program also appears to improve self-esteem scores of females. Although the majority of JROTC participants do not join the military, we find large marginal enlistment effects.

Higher education institutions and disciplines that traditionally did little research now reward faculty largely based on research, both funded and unfunded. Some worry that faculty devoting more time to research harms teaching and thus harms students' human capital accumulation. The economics literature has largely ignored the reasons for and desirability of this trend. We summarize, review, and extend existing economic theories of higher education to explain why incentives for unfunded research have increased. One theory is that researchers more effectively teach higher order skills and therefore increase student human capital more than non-researchers. In contrast, according to signaling theory, education is not intrinsically productive but only a signal that separates high-and low-ability workers. We extend this theory by hypothesizing that researchers make higher education more costly for low-ability students than do non-research faculty, achieving the separation more efficiently. We describe other theories, including research quality as a proxy for hard-to-measure teaching quality and barriers to entry. Virtually no evidence exists to test these theories or establish their relative magnitudes. Research is needed, particularly to address what employers seek from higher education graduates and to assess the validity of current measures of teaching quality.

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The Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps is a high school program that combines classroom teaching with extracurricular activities. The program is located primarily in inner city schools and serves at-risk students. Its goals are multidimensional and include military preparation and improving academic achievement. Using High School and Beyond data we find that the program's effects depend on the timing and intensity of involvement. Test scores, graduation rates, and enlistments are higher for students who participate early in high school and for those who persist in the program. Conversely, we find few effects for students participating in the last two years of high school.Keywords: JROTC; High school achievement; At-risk youth; Enlistments JEL Classification: I2 INTRODUCTIONThe Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC) is a high school program funded jointly by local school districts and the Department of Defense (DOD). Combined federal and local spending on the program is estimated to be roughly $600 million annually, which supports over 500,000 students in 3,400 high schools (US Department of Defense, 2008). Despite its size, numerous questions have been raised about the program's goals and orientation, and its impact on students. One recent article questions whether JROTC represents 'educational reform or militarization ' (Berlowitz and Long, 2003), while a second questions whether JROTC instructors are 'role models or recruiters ' (Atkins, 2005). Although these captions are meant to be provocative, they represent some of the policy issues surrounding the program. Ironically, JROTC is attacked by observers outside of DOD for being a military recruitment program, while it is criticized within DOD for not being a recruitment program (Coumbe and Harford, 1996). † Corresponding author. Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, 555 Dyer Road, Monterey, CA 93943, USA. E-mail: epema@nps.edu 1 Indicative of the controversy are anti-JROTC campaigns in some major cities (Nazario, 2007) and the decision in 2006 by the San Francisco School Board to eliminate JROTC from all city high schools (Tucker, 2006). E. PEMA AND S. MEHAYBeyond the controversy over its military orientation, numerous features of JROTC make it of interest to public policy analysts. First, the program serves a diverse student population, which includes many at-risk and disadvantaged students. Nearly 40% of JROTC units are located at inner-city schools, about half of all enrollees are minorities, and over 40% are females. Second, the program is multidimensional -its goals include leadership, communication, physical fitness, citizenship, and improving graduation rates and non-cognitive skills, such as self-esteem (Crawford et al., 2004). Local school districts are attracted to the program by the potential for student gains in cognitive and non-cognitive skills, but also by the federal subsidy, which covers about 40% of program costs (Denver Public Schools, 1996). Finally, although a common perception is that JRO...

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the distributional effects of distance learning (DL) on academic success, as measured by course grades and completion. Using data of over 1.2 million courses taken by about 200,000 U.S. Navy sailor‐students at more than 1800 U.S. institutions during 1994–2007, we find that distance delivery of education is associated with poorer outcomes. At the mean, DL delivery is associated with 0.19 lower course grade points; however, the mean effect masks the more pronounced negative effects of DL in the bottom two‐thirds of the distribution—where DL lowers grades by as much as 0.8 points. Using variation only among marginal students—those who tend to fail some of the courses that they take, our estimates indicate traditional face‐to‐face delivery is associated with 2.4 times greater likelihood of successful course completion than if it was delivered distant. These findings suggest that targeting DL courses to certain students may be more cost‐effective.