Black recruits up 49 percent in fiscal 2007 - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Black recruits up 49 percent in fiscal 2007

An increase in the number of black recruits shipped to boot camp in fiscal ‘07 reversed a seven-year slide in minority recruiting, though some predict hitting high numbers this year is going to get harder.

That’s because black communities are most likely to disapprove of the war in Iraq, and black families are more likely to resist sending their children into the service right now, according to a recently released Center for Naval Analyses report on the Corps’ minority recruiting efforts. The report recommends that the Marine Corps take steps to raise its profile in the black community, perhaps with an ad campaign outlining the successes of black Marines. Nearly 11 percent of fiscal 2007 recruits — 4,440 in all — were black, a 49 percent increase over the 2,980 contracted in fiscal 2006, which marked a low point for black recruiting in recent years, said Maj. Wes Hayes, a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruiting Command.

Mike Styka, deputy head of the Corps’ enlisted recruiting current operations, attributed the increase in black recruiting to a corresponding increase in the number of recruiters on the street.

In 2005 and 2006, the Corps was losing recruiters to reassignment or discharge faster than replacements could be sent to recruiter school, “so we had a lot of sectors that weren’t being covered,” Styka said.

By adding 400 more recruiters during fiscal 2007 to help meet the Corps’ goal of growing the active-duty ranks by 22,000 Marines by 2011, “we just had the ability to go everywhere,” he said.

Corps officials plan to add another 200 recruiters to America’s high schools and strip malls during the current fiscal year, as MCRC tries to increase black recruiting from 10.9 percent of all applicants to 13 percent. That would match nationwide demographics, according to Census Bureau data published in 2006.

Commandant Gen. James Conway wants diversity in the Marine Corps to mirror diversity in America, said his spokesman, Lt. Col. T.V. Johnson. The proportion of Marine personnel who are white, Hispanic, American Indian, Pacific Islander or other already closely resembles the respective population of each throughout the country, according to a briefing given by Maj. Gen. Richard Tryon, MCRC commanding general, to the Corps’ senior enlisted Marines at the annual sergeants major symposium in August.

High rates of re-enlistment

The CNA study, released Oct. 31, shows that historical difficulties in recruiting black Marines are offset by tremendous success in retaining them.

According to the report, black Marines re-enlist at “significantly higher rates” than any other group of Marines, which makes their overall representation in the Corps higher than their representation among recruits.

The black Marines who currently account for 32 percent of all sergeants major and master gunnery sergeants in the Corps are the same Marines who represented only 20 percent of the group recruited 20 years ago, according to the study.

That’s because black Marines find the quality of life “uneven” in the civilian sector, according to the study.

“Although many black men succeed” on the outside, “extremely low marriage rates and relatively high unemployment rates characterize the civilian experience for some,” the study states. “In contrast, black male enlisted Marines have steady jobs and are just as likely to be married as their white counterparts” in the Corps.

Black Marines tend to gravitate toward support military occupational specialties outside the combat arms field, where they enjoy higher job satisfaction rates that contribute to their tendency to re-enlist, according to the study.

In fiscal 2006, the re-enlistment rate among black Marines approaching the end of their first contract was 40.4 percent, while first-term re-enlistment rates for white and Hispanic Marines were 23.8 percent and 27.6 percent, respectively, according to the study.

Retired Sgt. Maj. Gary Lee, a former sergeant major of the Marine Corps who worked on the report for the CNA, said the findings are a counterpoint to prevailing sentiments in the black community, where parents and teachers who influence potential black applicants largely oppose the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and dissuade them from enlisting.

“All those things in our study we wanted to get out so that influencers in that community, even if they don’t like the concept of the current war, they will still view the Marine Corps as a positive thing for their sons and daughters,” he said.

The report recommends MCRC launch a public relations campaign in the black community to “publicize the lifestyle, job satisfaction and financial well-being that black youth can achieve through careers in the Corps,” though MCRC officials downplayed the possibility of trying anything new.

The Corps plans to spend more than $142 million on advertising this year, and while 75 percent is typically spent on general advertisements crossing racial and ethnic lines, the other 25 percent is earmarked for appeals to “African Americans, Hispanics, and every other ethnic group that may be put there,” said Eric Lindsay, diversity coordinator for MCRC’s marketing and advertising office.

“We’re continuing the march and just increasing the same efforts, doubling where we may be placing some print advertisement,” Lindsay said. “In the past, we’ve done six issues of ‘Ebony.’ Now we will do 12 issues.”