Research Symposium

BIO

Hello! My name is Philipp Belyaev, and I come from the city of Pompano Beach, FL. Currently studying accounting, I am also very passionate about the spheres of history and economics. I've greatly enjoyed my time working on our project and I cannot wait to share!

Draft-Dodging: Investigating the Relationship between Income and Vietnam War Draft Statistics

Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, the possibility for young, able-bodied men to be involuntarily drafted into the Vietnam War was non-trivial. Hundreds of thousands of young men across all fifty states and of all socioeconomic backgrounds attempted to evade the draft, so we investigated whether young men in wealthier states were more likely to successfully find exit options from the draft, using per capita personal income as a proxy for socioeconomic status. To investigate our two alternative hypotheses that per capita personal incomes are negatively correlated with induction risk and positively correlated with student deferment rates, we calculated the Pearson correlation coefficients and p-values for each dataset. We did not find a statistically significant negative correlation between per capita personal income and induction risk, but we did find a moderately positive, statistically significant correlation between per capita personal income and student deferment rates by state. This may indicate that young men from wealthier states and higher socioeconomic strata were more likely to achieve student deferments for college in order to avoid the Vietnam War draft, posing important implications for the socioeconomic dynamics of military conscription in the Postwar era.
Keywords: Vietnam War, draft, conscription, college deferment, labor markets, socioeconomics

Keywords: Vietnam draft, labor market, deferment