64% of Hispanic high school graduates don't score high enough to enlist

Another point from my new FAQ on the Richwine whoop-tee-doo in Taki's Magazine.

Q. Who cares about test scores besides the Ivy League? 

A. The military. A disproportionate number of Hispanics don’t qualify to enlist. A 2009 RAND Corporation report for the National Defense Research Institute to look into this sizable problem, Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth: Obstacles and Opportunities, found that “Hispanics are underrepresented among military recruits.” 

A major reason for this is that to get into the military these days, you have to score on the Pentagon’s entrance exam (the AFQT) at least at the 31st percentile (what the Pentagon calls Category IIIB). RAND reported: 

Only 36 percent of young Hispanic high school graduates would score in AFQT Category IIIB [31st percentile] or above, compared with 68 percent of white high school graduates. A key implication of this result is that increasing the high school graduation rate among Hispanic youth may not lead to comparable increases in enlistment eligibility. [Bold mine.]

Note that this comparison excludes the large percentage of young Hispanic high school dropouts. So, 64% of Hispanic high school graduates (in the major 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth study funded by the federal government) score in the bottom 30% of the AFQT, versus 32% of white high school graduates. Now, problems with the English language are an issue that sap Hispanic performance on the AFQT to some extent, but we're still talking about Hispanic high school graduates here, not dropouts. 

Also, the NLSY97's sample consisted of 9,000 kids from 12 to 16 on 12/31/96. So, it doesn't include immigrants who arrived after that age, and, I suspect, it would be light on illegal immigrants and even children of illegal immigrants, whose parents probably wouldn't be as quick to volunteer them for a study where the federal government tracks how they are doing each years for the rest of their lives.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issues annual reports on how its NLSY97 sample is doing in life as they reach each additional year of age. The 2013 report looked at progress by age 25:

At age 25, there was a large difference in educational attainment among racial and ethnic groups. NonHispanic blacks and Hispanics were about twice as likely as whites to be high school dropouts in the October they were age 25. In comparison, whites were more than twice as likely as blacks or Hispanics to have received their bachelor's degree by this age. Thirty percent of whites had received their bachelor's degree, compared with 14 percent of blacks and 12 percent of Hispanics. 

That's not horrible, but getting slightly less education than African-Americans isn't good, either. As I point out in my FAQ in Taki's, because Hispanics average higher overall on IQ tests than blacks, they ought to be getting more years of education than blacks get. Thus, IQ testing implies that Hispanic educational achievement is being depressed by the Hispanic culture of apathy toward education, which is something that could be fixed in the very long run -- an insight for which everybody ought to thank the IQ testing experts, not sneer at them.