The Consequences of Rising Youth Obesity for U.S. Military Academy Admissions

John Cawley and Johanna Maclean

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 2013, vol. 35, issue 1, 32-51

Abstract: This study estimates the percentage of the U.S. age-eligible population that exceeds weight-for-height admission standards of U.S. Military Academies, the undergraduate institutions that train officers for the U.S. Armed Forces. We analyze data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, and document that the fraction of age-eligible civilians exceeding the weight and fat standards for admission has more than doubled for men and nearly quadrupled for women between 1959 and 2010. Among women, exceeding these standards is roughly 13 percentage points more likely among African-Americans than whites, representing a challenge to the military, which strives for a racially-diverse officer corps. Simulations indicate that further increases in weight and fat of just 1% would result in a 16.5% increase for men, and 10.9% increase for women, in ineligibility for admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Overall, these results indicate that the current prevalence of and future trends in obesity threaten to reduce the quality of the officer corps, and thereby decrease U.S. military readiness.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aepp/pps032 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: The Consequences of Rising Youth Obesity for U.S. Military Academy Admissions (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:apecpp:v:35:y:2013:i:1:p:32-51.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy is currently edited by Timothy Park, Tomislav Vukina and Ian Sheldon

More articles in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().