Going to College to Avoid the Draft: The Unintended Legacy of the Vietnam War

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Abstract
The rise in college attendance rates in the mid-1960s is often attributed to draft avoidance behavior. Throughout most of the Vietnam war men who were enrolled in college could obtain deferments that delayed their eligibility for conscription. Anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggests that these deferments were an effective though imperfect way to avoid military service. We use data on enrollment and completed education of cohorts of men and women born between 1935 and 1959 to estimate the effect of draft avoidance behavior on the schooling choices of men who faced the highest risk of service during the Vietnam-era draft. We assume that in the absence of the draft the relative schooling outcomes of men and women would have followed a smooth inter-cohort trend. We find a strong link between the risk of induction faced by a cohort of men and their enrollment and completed education relative to women. We estimate that draft avoidance raised college attendance rates by 4-6 percentage points in the late 1960s, and raised the fraction of men born in the late 1940s with a college degree by up to 2 percentage points.

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