The Army can ease its recruiting difficulties by actively targeting individuals who withdrew from college, according to a new Land Warfare paper published by the Association of the U.S. Army.

“Prior to 2023, the U.S. Army did not specifically market to former college students who withdrew before graduating,” Maj. William Barna II writes. “From the total pool of 2021 U.S. high school graduates, approximately 493,000 of them who had initially gone on to college opted to withdraw sometime in their freshman year. And [U.S. Army Recruiting Command] did not target them.”

In “Expanding the Reach of U.S. Army Recruiting: Marketing to Former College Students,” Barna reveals how potential recruits who left college could be a valuable Army recruiting asset.

Amid recruiting efforts complicated by medical and physical entry standards, a low propensity to serve and private sector competition, potential recruits with some college education are “more likely to walk into a recruiting center on their own” and outperform peers that joined earlier, Barna writes, citing findings from a 2014 Rand Corp. study.

Barna is an intelligence officer with the 10th Mountain Division and a 2024 graduate of the School of Advanced Military Studies. He has a master’s degree from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

Though the Army has had several marketing campaigns since January 1971, its target demographic “has not really changed significantly since the beginning of the all-volunteer force,” Barna writes.

“These individuals will likely be in the U.S. Army’s overall target demographic for enlistment based just on their age of 17–24 years old, but they are in a different position in life from immediate high school grads and GED earners and should therefore be pursued differently,” he writes.  

Ads highlighting themes that affect former college students could encourage them to enlist, Barna writes.

“Approximately 24 percent of freshman college students drop out each year. This means that an advertisement campaign with a theme of overcoming academic or financial adversity through U.S. Army service has the potential to resonate with several hundred thousand people each year,” he writes. “Any of these former students can be the right person, for the right position, that the U.S. Army is looking for.”

Read the paper here.