In order to recruit at the Ivy Leagues the Army would be wise to leave behind all their field uniforms that look like rumpled pajama's or the Class A’s which make them look like hotel doormen. Rather, they will need to engage these prospective students with some rational arguments. All the standard run of the mill recruiting gimmicks and paraphernalia might be fine for impressionable high school types but Harvard is a little different.

To get Tom’s Yale (guy or gal) interested in the Army that service might have to actually make an intellectually convincing argument that what they have been doing the past ten years actually makes sense and has a meaningful purpose and that is no easy obstacle to overcome.

What likely works at some right wing dinky Christian college down south may not cut it at Cornell or Stanford or MIT. Lets say there is a student at one of these elite schools who is adventuresome or has a patriotic impulse and is attracted to military service perhaps even anxious to serve. Why would he go into the Army when he could just as easily go into the Navy, Coast Guard or if he had a particularly pugnacious personality and was tough nut rugby player go all the way and do the Marines?

Tell them ROTC will look good on their applictions to transfer to Harvard.

Just send a bunch of SF or Delta guys w beards and wearing some coat of many colors and a burnoose or something ethnic.

We had a battlefield intelligence coordinator from Princeton, if you can do it there you ought to be able to at Harvard or Yale. (I was guessing she'd gone cross town to ROTC but that is not the case, Princeton has ROTC program)

Tom was spot on. Two tables, one with all the brain trust books on it, and one with the muscle mass on it, throw in an M4 maxed out on the CDI Index (Chicks Dig It). Mix in one LTC and one CPT, with hair; LTC in his ASUs and the CPT in his ACUs (maybe multi-cam?); perhaps an Infantry Captain, full of piss and vinegar like those he is recruiting, perhaps a graduate of one of the more the elite schools, and a Military Intelligence LTC who graduated from the Havard G3 fellowship cohort and understands the rigors. Attention HRC, you have to find these guys and rotate them into the recruiting side of the house or put them on TDY! These two need to be smart, be able to talk smart: when would I do grad school? Do I get the GI Bill? What if I only want one Job? I never want to be in the infantry, can that happen? What is the exact amount of time I am signing up for? Side note: The ASU and ACU are here to stay, get over it; if you don’t wash and dry yours and hang it up so it doesn’t look like you slept in it, that is your fault, not mine. Instead of the subdued patches and badges on the ACU, that guy wears the colored divisional patch on both arms and the blue and silver EIB/CIB; who doesn’t enjoy seeing that blood red BIG RED ONE, or the All American 82D with its AIRBORNE crescent. A big banner with “I have a problem for you to solve…” or something similar, and the two dudes INVITE students over to a laptop where they get to spend a few minutes fighting a VBS2 scenario, making decisions, moving things, and seeing how incredibly difficult it is to maneuver and fight, and at the same time get to see the technology being leveraged inside the force to train Soldiers. Let them put on all the gear and look through the ACOG, play with the NVGs; but no SF/Ranger Videos!
Instead of a pencil or a keychain, students are handed a tri-fold or a small 8-10 page booklet that has CDI pictures, the officer roadmap (from signing on the dotted line-to commissioning-PL time-CPT-Grad School- to earning the rank of general), pay charts, etc.; and most importantly, 2-3 short paragraph blurbs written by some of our more distinguished Generals (Dempsey, Petraeus, McMasters, Rodriguez, Lynch, Thurman types) on what it means to be an officer, the challenges of being an officer, and the rewards to being an officer. Any candidate who actually signs up, whether its OCS or ROTC gets a signed copy of one of the brain matter books; I don’t think any of those authors would be upset with helping the bigger cause by donating a hundred or so books with a personal message of encouragement inside the front cover. If we want to go the extra-step, we liaison with State and maybe one of the other large, maybe secretive agencies, and stack our booths together so that the students see that not only are there other federal service opportunities, but those places also value the experience and benefit from former Army Officers.

Absolutely No Army painted HUMMER, van, or car. These guys show up in a government SUV, very vanilla and in civilian clothes; they change to work, and then change back to civilian clothes when they leave showing these students that the Army isn't going to zip them into a uniform from sunrise to sunset.

Ivy League grads are just like any other 22 year old college grads in the world., uncertain about the future and their place in it. They just may just slightly more full of themselves, but only slightly.

Forget all the gimmicks and have one of your best, most personable and professional captains and one of your best, most personable and professional NCOs standing behind a folding table. Both would be combat vets and both well turned out. Then just leave them answer questions truthfully. That is all you would need. The message is "Here we stand. You can join us if you can measure up." It would be enough.

It seems to me the people who write books while in the don't tend to make General officer. General McMaster did, but from what I know he spent several years waiting on the lists to get picked up. One of the officers above got out--Andrew Exum--before he had seved ten years (joining Nathaniel Fick and others who wrote books). John Nagl is the case study for officers getting out and not getting promoted. I believe Colonels Krepenvich and Mansoor fall in the same category.

I am just saying, as an active-duty offficer, the emphasis on intellectual rigor and demands is not their in the Army. The desire to be able to run sub-6 minute miles is the primary focus of the bulk of the officer corps, not reading and writing.

My sense is that most people would be surprised at the number of graduate degrees held by members of the military, so Tom's idea is a good one. One quibble with the post though. The pose employed in the picture was and is a fairly common pose for that type of shot. It indicates a certain formality, not defensiveness.

Or maybe we could declare the AVF an abject failure (argue with that after the AVF actually succeeds at something, like - say - Iraq, or Afghanistan) and return to the draft. that would force some intelligent children to make some intelligent decisions about their military obligation.

Great respect for those serving but none at all for the nation's system that hires its wars done rather than fighting them with citizens (and thus makes war easy and attractive to all those patriots with zero skin in the game).

I concur with all. Listen, I was one of the elite school dudes. I did undergrad at a fairly rigorous/prestigious college and then did a Masters program at another rigorous/prestigious university; both private schools. As a sophomore, I flirted some with ROTC, but it wasn't the Army, it was the Marines, even back then in BDUs or the Class Bs the Army did not present very professional; and the keychain was horrible…and who uses a non-mechanical pencil anymore? The USMC dudes were always in their dress uniform; they talked incredibly smart and didn't try to sell me on retarded stuff, they showed me exactly what my timeline would look like, when I would do what, and how long. I got phone calls from USMC officers to talk to me about the process and the experience. The Navy dudes didn't blow smoke either; they immediately began talking to me about Flying, not NAVSPECWAR or whatever else the Navy does/talks to sell people; offered to get me enrolled into a course to study up on the flight test you have/had to take, etc. You can’t BS these students. Show the reality, don’t lie or gimmick them, you said it: They are too smart for that.

Maybe an Infantry dude isn’t the right model, it was a suggestion. ZATHRAS is right; Infantry Platoon Leaders are not going to change the world. We are just the ones out living under a HESCO and executing all the policy/COIN/War stuff you guys spend hours critiquing here so we can ETS and go work for a think tank trying to change the world. MICHAEL_C: Spot on dude! It has to be the right dudes, not the guy who is going to stand up there and pontificate about running a ten-minute 2-mile, Ranger School, Mother Benning’s School for Boys, and how cool Airborne school is in July. It has got to be a smart kid; a true-believer but not a fanatic. The book thing was Rick’s idea. I liked it. I read those things because these are the guys creating and writing things like TRADOC Pam 525-3-1 and 525-3-6 (Dempsey), writing books about how we did ourselves wrong (McMasters), and understanding the need to dislodge the Army’s commitment to the cloister and the grindstone (Petraeus). Yes, the culture in the Army needs to change…see the post from 2 days ago about the non-acknowledged exodus out of the Army of junior officers.

When I walked into the recruiters office a month out form graduating from grad school, they all about fell off their chairs because I was the first student from that school that any of the station NCOs could remember wanting to join the Army. They had also recently been asked to leave the university grounds after a large protest from the law school. I had a lot of questions. They were smart and found an OCS grad to answer my questions (some of which I already had the answer too). They did the right thing, and didn’t try to sway me on a gimmick. They laid it out very plain and clear. They exhibited the values of their organization. That stuck with me.

Again, yes, the M4 isn't what it should be; neither is the M9…the ACU…ASU…Beret...OS, etc. It is what we have over here on the non-special side of the house. Should we have something better, F*#$ yes! What are you going to do, show them stuff they more than likely never lay hands on? You're better than that!

"You can’t BS these students. Show the reality, don’t lie or gimmick them, you said it: They are too smart for that."-
that is the biggest thing they can do to sell the ROTC to students, just be straight with them, lay it out and see if they want to do it. This is something far to many recruiters do not do and even the way the Army is marketed to the general public is wrong. The USMC is blunt and to the point, I remember the posters that said "We didn't promise you are a rose garden" with a picture of a recruit getting beat on by the O Course! lol Great stuff and truth in advertising goes a long way with people.

"Maybe an Infantry dude isn’t the right model, it was a suggestion. ZATHRAS is right; Infantry Platoon Leaders are not going to change the world."-
I disagree with this, it is the infantry guys who if they stay in will be directly influencing things, the Army does not need more Cubical Bunnies they need Combat Leaders and those are the guys who have the most influence down the road on TTPs and Culture.

I commissioned into the Marines out of Cornell. I didn't do the ROTC route; Ithaca was far too fun on the weekdays to wake up at 6:00AM. I spent my summers, subsequently, at Officer Candidates School in Quantico, VA, and was like any other student during the school year.

I talked to a selection officer unsolicited in what at the time wasn't much more than a fit of idealism, but I was the exception, not the rule, and this rule hampers recruitment at Cornell and I'm sure at the other Ivies. By "rule" I mean traditional recruitment techniques, which seem vastly inept at attracting young men and women at Ivies and equivalent schools. Three reasons:

1) First and foremost, there is more competition with other career fields that starts very early on. Freshmen at Cornell were already competing for summer internships their first semester, intending to track themselves to a job offer (hopefully at a six-figure consultancy or investment bank) by the time they were seniors. This leaves little room during the summer for ventures like OCS

2) Higher amount of students aiming for graduate school. Many of my undergraduate friends were looking, if not for jobs, to Med/Law school or postgraduate degrees in some form of hard science or engineering. This may be anecdotal, but Cornell, for its part, has a very large, well beyond the national average, of graduate school placement. This, however, is more likely due to the very large premed and engineering programs. Obviously, pursuit of anything more than a 1 or 2 year MS would preclude military service.

3) Quite honestly, a healthy skepticism of the armed forces and particularly recruiters. "THE FEW THE PROUD", "HOMETOWN WARRIOR" and painted SUVs, as other comments have noted, have precisely the opposite their intended effect on a student body with the social and political proclivities seen at a school like Cornell. My selection officer noted this, and later came to career fairs in at most Service Alphas.

Food for thought. Regards.

As an Ivy League product (Yale and Cornell) who served four years in the Indochina war with an Ivy league ROTC daughter who served in Iraq, I really don’t see what the fuss is all about.

Cornell, Penn and Princeton kept their ROTC programs going throughout the Vietnam kerfuffle and most of the rest of the Ivy League seems to be coming home again.

Fussy professors at Harvard have complained about having to allow “Harvard credit hours” for military science courses, but when one considers that one can earn Harvard Credit hours writing rap lyrics in one of the ethnic studies majors, the argument seems easily dismissed.

One naval officer who was in Cornell ROTC during Vietnam and went on to three stars was, at one stage, a student of mine at NWC. He told me that by wearing wire rim glasses and frizzing his hair six days a week, nobody ever recognized him on the Cornell Campus on Wednesdays when he was in uniform, squared-away his hair, and wore plastic rim mil-spec glasses.

An ace NWC student who was airforce ROTC at Stanford (and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford before going on to being a pilot) told me that during the Vietnam war era she and four buddies changed into their uniforms at a gas station 20 clicks outside of Palo Alto enroute to their cross-town ROTC site at Berleley. She said the uniforms drew more comment at Stanford than Berkeley, where students from a dozen bay area universities converged on Wednesdays for drill.

Thank goodness that we have put most of the Vietnam-era sanctimony behind us.

I don't know if many young people are interested in shaping the world, but serving in the armed forces is a good entry point into the worlds of diplomacy, business, intelligence and military power. Surely this has some Ivy League appeal.

I had little vision of the world when I got an ROTC commission from the University of Michigan in 1959, but it turns out that it led to virtually everything rewarding (however defined) that I've done since.

About the South. I've lived in the Florida Panhandle now for about 18 months. I met a fair number of low to high, but one theme seems to fit nearly all: they opt for freedom over security. I am not being judgmental, because I fit somewhere in the middle. But I watched skilled men building my new house, with a labor rate of about $8.00 an hour. While they made almost nothing by the standards of Northern Virginia, they entertained me with stories about their trucks, women, hunting and carousing. When I raised the issue about making more if they were unionized, the conversation stopped.

As an Ivy grad, ROTC has a lot of appeal for a number of factors to many of the students. First, there is the scholarship money, which can be a significant help at those schools. Second, there is the physical challenge, which many of them are seeking along with the other intellectual challenges on those campuses. Third, there is the potential to lead and problem solve in a unique environment.

If you start with those items and have smart, sharp looking, physically fit exemplars, you can go a long way in your recruiting in many places.

Also, as for my fellow Penn alum, Andrew Exum, I believe he explained in his book that a knee injury led to him leaving the service more than anything.

McMaster, Nagl, Krepinevich, and Mansoor ~ the first four authors you mentioned ~ all West Point graduates as well as instructors at the institution. For someone who has been so critical of military-focused higher education, you seem quick to reach to the very products of these institutions when you tout the intelligence and creativity required in leadership on the battlefield.

How do you rectify that?

There may be a way, I'll admit, by virtue of their individual intellectual capabilities (perhaps it would have been nurtured even further had they stayed away from the Long Gray Line?). However, that argument doesn't really stand up to scrutiny - it would be hard to justify that Princeton had a greater shaping influence on GEN Petraeus' development than West Point...

All best,
A soon to be Military Strategy instructor at that institution!

How about we keep it simple and use the model that MIT ROTC has been using at all their schools (Harvard, Tufts, etc) for the last few years?
It seemed to work well when I was there. We do not need to reinvent recruiting for just another Ivy League school. Oh and one other thing, cadets there do want to go into infantry, SF, armor, aviation, civil affairs etc...its not all doctors and lawyers

I recall reading someplace that one of the reasons people gave for kicking ROTC off the Ivy League campuses was professors in other subjects who felt the ROTC instructors lacked the credentials to be called professors of anything.

If so, being able to offer up one or more of the people whose books you're putting on the table as instructors for the new unit would probably be a good way to seal the deal.

...or we could save the government quite a bit of time and money by not expending resources on a population that in my opinion may not be worth the effort.

I served with a kid who graduated from Harvard and without a doubt he was the least impressive officer I had ever met. Very smart and a really nice guy but the last person I would choose to put in charge of soldiers. I believe his OER read, "Soldiers follow him merely out of curiosity." I know a sample size of one does not make for a convincing empirical study but read on.

Realistically speaking how many students is the military going to be able to recruit from these schools? I have absolutely no data to back this up but my gut tells me not many. Someone needs to do a cost-benefit analysis on this decision and figure out what the ROI for the military looks like.

What about the academies? Aren't they the service's equivalent to the Ivies? Is it worth the cost to recruit at these "elite" schools given the amount of money we spend on our service academies? How much more is it going to cost the military to pay for a four year scholarship for a kid at Harvard or Yale who in all likelihood is going to be no better than the kid from USC or Rutgers... and in my opinion will be decidedly worse than your average cadet from West Point, Texas A&M or the Citadel.

It's amazing how much time we spend training officers on critical thinking, analysis, meta-cognition, and decision making yet rarely do we see it in practice.

I remain skeptical until convinced otherwise.

Awesome

I am the "Scholarship and Enrollment Officer" for Cornell University and we currently have 120 Students in our Program (40 coming directly from the Cornell Campus, the others attending nearby colleges). I have to be honest, I don't do much "recruiting". On average each week 2-6 students contact me or walk into the office of their own accord and although all don't join I think that Cornell students in general are more geared towards service (in all capacities) then other Ivy League Colleges. (I don't have any demographics to back that up but Cornell is a land grant school with a prestigious agricultural studies program). Additionally the colleges overarching philosophy "Any Person, Any Study" I think influences other students to be more accepting of ROTC Cadets on Campus

Also part of the difference is the history:

-Cornell Ezra promised that Cornell "shall be to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, including military tactics"

-Up until 1962 all males had to be enrolled in Army ROTC their freshmen and sophomore years

-Cornell provided more military officers in WWI than any other commissioning source, to include West Point

-The most decorated American, ever, was a graduate of Cornell- LTC Matt Urban, who has one more award than Audie Murphy. He is currently celebrated in the Wordham Museum on Campus

The Army Officer Corps needs a diverse body of intelligence- some students excel in analytical and critical thinking, and others, like our students from Ithaca College excel in emotional intelligence in regards to influencing and motivating people. All of these attributes make our Officer Corps stronger and our Soldier deserve the best we can offer them.

Excellent question and well-written article. I also had the chance to read the follow-up at

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/04/21/the_army_should_fix_the_geographical_narrowness_of_its_rotc_programs

It is a good question, since there are some bright young students out there. A good part of them can probably be interested in it as well. They are your typical 22-year olds, just starting out life outside university. They can be motivated and ambitious... and a bit full of themselves. (Well, just slightly over-confident, more so than others. They'll get by.) They can be informed what is available for them. Some of them can still pursue careers in govt positions.

I agree with the idea of a book table, though not fully. Let's look at two aspects of recruiting at Ivies: Visibility and Career recruitment. The first is showing what is place of military is about and sharing what Washington is about. A lot of those people are well-connected. They need to be informed of others. And they'll possibly question policy as a mode operandi. It is worthwhile to make the effort to connect with them sooner, in university, than later. This is where putting those books on the table is important.

The second is career recruitment. There probably are students who would want to join in as well. The follow-up article is a good choice. No gimmicks there too - obviously.

I would go to Yale and tell the men to join the Marine Corps' Platoon Leaders Class and pictures of alum Fred Smith, Marine Vietnam vet and Chairman of Fed-Ex, and of William Broyles, Jr., Marine Vietnam vet and screenwriter of "Unfaithful," "Planet of the Apes," "Jarhead," and many more.