How did ending student deferments affect college enrollment and campus protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s?
Executive summary
Ending or curtailing student draft deferments in the mid-to-late 1960s removed a major legal escape valve that had been driving increased college attendance and converted academic vulnerability into political urgency—pushing some men toward graduate study earlier in the decade and turning campuses into focal points of antiwar resistance when deferments were tightened or revoked [1] [2]. The policy shift intensified and broadened protests—escalating sit-ins, building takeovers, and clashes with police and National Guard units—though outcomes varied by institution, class, and race and scholars caution against treating campuses as a monolithic political organism [3] [4] [5].
1. How deferments shaped enrollment numbers before they were curtailed
Full-time college enrollment had already swelled in the 1960s in part because student deferments created a material incentive to attend: historians and contemporary accounts tie a 4–6 percent bump in college attendance during the late 1960s to deferment policy, and national enrollment rose from about three million in 1960 to roughly ten million by 1970, a boom that reshaped campus demographics and capacities [1] [2]. This expansion was uneven—middle‑ and upper‑class white men disproportionately benefited because college was costly and minority enrollment remained low—which meant that changes in deferment rules were felt unequally and politically charged on campuses [1].
2. The policy reversal that lit the fuse
Beginning in 1965 and climaxing with measures like the reissuance of the Selective Services Qualifying Test (SSQT) and directives from Director Lewis Hershey, the Selective Service System moved to curb the old 2‑S college deferment and to condition deferments on class rank or test scores, making many students vulnerable to reclassification and induction [6] [7]. Media and institutional reporting document that these administrative shifts—especially the October 1967 “Hershey’s Directives”—were read by many students as punitive and politically motivated, directly provoking organizing around draft resistance [6] [4].
3. From policy change to protests: mechanisms and moments
The translation from policy to protest worked through several mechanisms: fear of induction converted private anxieties into collective action; universities’ cooperation with draft boards (sending grades, ranks) made administrations complicit in students’ eyes; and national antiwar networks such as SDS amplified local grievances into mass mobilizations—examples include campus sit‑ins, anti‑recruiter actions, and targeted disruptions that escalated into violent confrontations in some places [8] [3] [9]. High‑profile flashpoints like Columbia’s late‑1960s mobilization illustrated how draft‑related grievances intersected with broader campus demands over governance and military research [10] [4].
4. Variation across campuses, classes, and regions
Not all campuses reacted the same: elite institutions where competition for deferments was intense saw specific conflicts over rank and testing [7], large public universities faced mass mobilizations tied to swelling enrollments and campus services, and racial disparities shaped who literally had the most to lose—minority and working‑class men, less likely to be in college, were more exposed to induction even as protests highlighted civil‑rights linkages [2] [11]. Historians caution against monolithic readings: student movements splintered into competing factions with different goals and tactics, so deferment policy was a powerful but not solitary cause [4] [5].
5. Immediate outcomes and longer‑term educational effects
In the short term, the curtailment of deferments catalyzed waves of campus disruption that, by 1970, coincided with national crises—Cambodia, Kent State, and mass campus closures—forcing administrations, courts, and legislatures to respond to student demands and public order concerns [3]. Longer‑term, scholarship is mixed: some studies link deferments to increased male college participation during the war years, and comparative research (outside the U.S. context) shows abolishing student deferments can reduce higher‑education enrollments, but causal paths are complex and entwined with economic and policy shifts beyond the draft [1] [12].
6. Conclusion and limits of the record
Curtailing student deferments was a decisive accelerant: it turned a demographic boost into a political grievance, amplified campus protest tactics, and helped nationalize student opposition to the Vietnam War, yet it operated alongside other drivers—escalation of the war, the Free Speech Movement, racial justice struggles, and institutional grievances—that together produced the era’s turbulence [4] [9]. The available sources document correlations and contemporaneous reactions robustly, but quantifying the precise share of enrollment changes or protest intensity attributable solely to deferment policy remains contested in the scholarship and not fully resolvable from the cited records [1] [12].