Snopes: [True] Project 2025 Wants All Public High School Students To Take Military Entrance Exam?

That dude has a lot of forehead.

The problem is that just discriminates against lower and middle class people more than anything.

It is work experience that has no meaningful value for a career (especially if EVERYONE has it) that mostly just serves to delay when people start college/trade school/whatever. Which hurts their ability to "hit the ground running" because they need to relearn what little they retained from high school but also impacts lifelong learning rather significantly. Whereas anyone who can pay off a doctor to say they have flat feet or some other non "yucky" issue will skip it.

And also? It is more or less worthless for the military. For anything short of cannon fodder, a year is nowhere near enough time to train someone to be useful. Even room clearing (e.g. Rangers) needs significantly more training to be less likely to shoot friendlies than foes. A lot of the problems in the Ukraine war (on both sides, honestly) can be traced to this. A soldier who can do more than "hold the line" needs significant training.

And while I think a return to having a strong emphasis on civil engineering and infrastructure as public service would be a great idea... without an education that is basically just hard physical labor. So now we have even more kids starting with debilitating injuries before they even begin their "real" career.

I say force everyone to do a year of retail. That'll do wonders for compassion as a whole.

I mostly agree. I think having a "do it by age 30" rule or something might be a little better than requiring it at 18 (I graduated high school at 17 and was already in university at 18 so this would have messed things up financially as well as mentally).

the high school I went to had a mandatory number of hours of community service in order to graduate. It was neat, the kids did a very wide variety of things.

In my country, if you can't do the mandatory military service (and yes, being a pacifist is a valid reason I believe), you can do the same amount of time working for a charity and get paid minimum wage. I know a guy who worked for the food bank, but there are other options obviously.

It's not the perfect program - I'd prefer if you could just immediately choose to do the humanitarian service instead of the military one, rather than having to go through the medical check for the military one first. And I think minimum wage is pretty horrible if you don't also get provided housing... But overall, I like the idea.

I’m not opposed to a mandatory community service year upon turning 18, where a person who is physically and mentally able is required to spend 12 months PAID to work in a government organized community service program.

Why do we need mandatory service when we can just offer a good salary in a citizens conversation corps that prioritizes high schoolers in hiring?

I think this would make more sense if it were connected to public education somehow. Lots of high schools already require community service hours to graduate, turn that into a program where third and fourth year students spend some time in school and some time doing some kind of public service work. Though It would need to be more of an educational thing than actual paid work.

We have private schools. But they just can't charge tuition.

Is illegal to charge to be a private tutor?

Ask one of the schmucks advocating for this to be the first to enlist and I bet they’ll have some bullshit excuse as to why they can’t

Require all private schools that wish to have accreditation take a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $11 of federal dollars.

Ok, but also I see this causing populist style attacks on disabled kids too. Especially those with invisible or “minor but valid” disabilities that disqualify.

Fuck that’s awful. Were you in Idaho or something equally awful?

I went to high school during peace time — that used to be a thing way back when — and I think my school required it for ROTC but maybe it was more of a strong suggestion rather than a requirement.

We also had possibly the worst possible system for military recruiters. You had to choose between the regular P.E. class, weight lifting (if you played a sport), and ROTC. The end result was that ROTC was always like 2% committed future service members (who would have joined the military with or without high school ROTC) and 98% awkward people avoiding sports at all cost. (Or the worst fate of all, 1st hour PE so you were the person who smelled like stanky teen gym clothes in every one of your classes.)

My school had us all take it at 16.

If you refused you had to go sit in the cafeteria by yourself and weren’t allowed to even study. Just sit there with your eyes open not doing anything for like 4 hours.

Every time I hear stories like this, it reminds me of my old high school. As it was the only public school in the city and there were no alternatives, it was damn near impossible to actually get expelled unless you were physically threatening or dealing cocaine in the halls.

They tried punishments like this too for a variety of reasons. Not being ready for gym class, or some hands-on class that requires a uniform. In-school suspension for minor infractions. Dress code violations. Stuff like that. They were happy that most of the kids bothered to show up and not cause problems at all. Kids were gonna sit there with their headphones on, head on a desk, and probably taking a nap. Attempting to tell the kids they couldn't do that was probably going to be met with a middle finger. What were you gonna do, suspend them? That's what they wanted in the first place. It was a 3 day vacation to them.

Our school offered it, and you got out of your other classes to take it. I’m still in the military, some 18 years later, and I’d still suggest it for everyone as an option like mine was. I wouldn’t even feel too badly about schools requiring it. It’s just another test, without any obligation after. But, for a lot of lower income families, and for students who don’t perform too well, this opens another option for them after they graduate. Especially one that, with some potential risks to your body or life… could absolutely pay for your college.

bro you're saying this as a fun anecdote but i'm not from america and this is terrifying

Reddit was right. You are being gang stalked by the government.

I didn't take it and I still had guys showing up at my door, calling me, and in one case a Marine recruiter ran two blocks to talk to me.

About face and March :slams door:

We'd need a wide range of rich people munitions if we wanted to fight a war. Armor-piercing rich people, incendiary rich people, cluster rich people, high-explosive rich people. It'll be quite the endeavor.

I had all 3 branches showing up at my house and lying to my face to get me to join after my school made me take it.

You'd think they would realize that lying to someone who scored really high was a bad idea.

I wonder how low you have to score before the military doesn't bother to recruit you, because I had to take the ASBAV in high school and I just filled in bubbles at random since I had no interest in dying in Iraq. I still got a high enough score that recruiters kept bothering me for years.

We took it senior year and I really didn't know about it at the time. I must have flipped some switch because every branch started calling, and a navy recruiter actually came to my house wanting to talk about nuke school. I was like I don't want to bomb anyone with nukes thank you very much lol.

I scored high on all fields but one and the recruiter never left me alone for four years, even finding me on Facebook.

"I'm sorry, I had an accident lately. Lost a hand and half my lung, and lost parts of my gray matter. Anyways, what would be my starting rank? General?"

Yep. I got hounded for years and years.

It isn't hard...also, they will take you anyway, you would just be a bangbang.

But also you just don't need to. I didn't realize that not everyone took the ASVAB. My public High School administered it to everyone (May have been an opt out option, don't remember) and I did pretty well. As a result, I was contacted by recruiters two or three times, promptly said I wasn't interested, and that was the end of it.

I took it in high school just to have some extra testing under my belt for some reason that made sense at the time. It was probably the easiest test that I'd taken all 4 years. They're not testing for who can be rocket surgeons, but for people who have practical smarts. There were a couple of questions where you were given a series of 10 connected gears and giving the rotation direction of the first had to predict the last. Yeah, not calculus.

When I took my asvab I was surprised when they told me my mechanical aptitude was really good...didn't know a Phillips from a flat head but wound up as an aircraft mechanic which was fuckin dope!

Especially thanks to the corrupt AF B DeVos

Well, we’ll still get blowed up.

Letting private schools operate as a draft dodging system, almost sounds like a feature rather than a bug.

Reagan. Talk to Reagan.

Why not just get rid of Selective Service entirely?

I taught in a district where it was mandatory to take the ASVAB. My principal said fine... "All tenth graders take the ASVAB".

Recruiters can only access students if in grade 11 and 12. (? Probably it's about the age for enlisting)

Best administrator I ever had.

It was optional for us in the 90s. I took it to get out of class and what a terrible idea that was. I had recruiters hounding me for months.

That may have been location dependent. In the my school in the 90s it was optional. I didn't take it because I didn't want more recruiters calling me, so I'll always be curious at how I'd have done.

There's always openings in front line infantry!

The more you cede, the more they will take.

It literally has no bearing on their school grades.

For now.

Having to give on off advice to each child each time they are compelled to take a military aptitude test is much worse than not compelling that test.

If it ever becomes forced, colleges and employers are going to expect to see scores. Absence of ASVAB results will be conspicuous.

Armed services don’t have enough recruits, so they want a bigger pool to chose from. If every kid has to take ASVAB, then they have a much bigger pool of possibilities, including being able to actively recruit better suited people. The other point was to expand jROTC, to do exactly that.

I had no interest in the military but took ASVAB thinking of it as practice for SAT, which I did care about. However the tests were different enough to not be good practice, plus then I was constantly recruited by all branches. I expect they want to be able to do more of this

The required part would be new.

In some schools. In my public school, we took practice ACTs and SATs.

Just because something's "been done for decades" isn't a good reason to keep doing it, much less to expand the practice. I mean, 50 years after the draft ended, but men still have to register, isn't a good reason to sign up women.