How did college and medical deferments shape socioeconomic inequalities in Vietnam War draft outcomes?
Executive summary
College and medical deferments during the Vietnam War created structural incentives that funneled educational and health‑profession opportunities toward men with socioeconomic advantages, and thereby redistributed wartime risk away from the college‑bound and toward working‑class and poorer men [1] [2]. Those deferments increased college and professional‑school enrollment, were exploitable via connections and medical diagnoses, and—until policy reforms and the draft lottery—helped entrench race and class disparities in who served [3] [4] [5].
1. How the deferment system worked as a class filter
The Selective Service explicitly allowed student deferments (II‑S) and special status for certain professional or “vital” studies, which operated as a de facto safety valve for those who could access higher education or selective professional schools, concentrating avoidance among the middle and upper classes [1] [6]. Contemporary observers and subsequent empirical work show the rise in male college entry from 1964–68 tracked the intensification of the draft, demonstrating the deferment’s powerful incentive effect: young men who could afford or gain admission to college enrolled in large numbers to delay or escape induction [7] [2].
2. Medical and occupational exemptions: legitimate needs or loopholes?
Medical deferments and occupational or paternity exceptions expanded the share of men formally ineligible for service, with millions holding non‑combat deferments such as III‑A paternity status and various medical classifications; by 1969 more than 4 million men held paternity deferments, dwarfing education deferments in raw counts and revealing multiple administrative paths out of service [4]. Those paths, however, were unevenly accessible: anecdotal and investigative reporting documented that political connections and sympathetic local boards or family physicians could produce favorable medical classifications, creating an advantage for those with social capital [8] [5].
3. Who bore the burden: class, race, and the composition of the fighting force
Scholars and contemporaneous critics argued that the system produced a fighting force disproportionately drawn from lower‑income, working‑class communities because men from wealthier backgrounds could stay in school or secure exemptions, a dynamic that turned public outrage toward the draft’s inequities [8] [5]. Policy choices that favored certain STEM and health fields—deemed “vital” to national security—further amplified racial and socioeconomic gaps in deferral access, since minority and poor applicants faced greater barriers to those programs [1].
4. Behavioral responses and the education boom
The draft’s pull on educational decisions was large enough to alter enrollment patterns: studies link draft avoidance to increased college and medical‑school applications in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with rapid upticks in health‑profession applicants in 1968–74 that are directly tied to deferment incentives [3] [2]. Econometric analyses using the draft lottery as a natural experiment find that enrollment was a strategic response to induction risk, and that cohorts who avoided service through education experienced longer‑run differences in attainment and earnings—an “unintended legacy” that shaped inequality trajectories [2] [9].
5. Policy shifts, lotteries, and limits to fairness
Political pressure led to reforms: Nixon’s 1970 executive actions curtailed some occupational and paternity deferments (with many existing holders grandfathered) and the Selective Service instituted lotteries beginning in 1969 to inject randomness into induction order, while later ending undergraduate student deferments in 1971—steps intended to reduce subjective local‑board advantages but imperfect in redressing accumulated inequities [4] [5]. These changes reduced, but did not immediately eliminate, the class gradient produced by years of deferment‑driven sorting [4] [5].
6. Caveats, competing interpretations, and gaps in the record
While multiple sources document enrollment spikes and disproportionate service by the working class, exact causal magnitudes—how much deferments alone versus other factors (e.g., voluntary enlistment, local labor markets, racial discrimination in admissions) contributed to inequalities—remain subject to ongoing empirical debate, and the records do not fully capture informal uses of influence at local boards [7] [2]. The reporting reviewed provides strong evidence that deferments mattered for distributional outcomes, but precise quantification of downstream inequality across race and region requires more targeted archival and individual‑level study than these sources alone provide [7] [2].