Pat,
Close. Branch training is a cost for every officer, so that's a wash. The degree will almost always be cheaper for OCS-IS, but chances are that many of those degrees were paid for with tuition assistance, so while it's a cost advantage to OCS-IS, it's not free. I also suspect that the overhead for OCS isn't a factor, as much of that infrastructure has to exist to allow OCS to be a viable source of high throughput expansion in the event of a major war that requires the # of commissions to skyrocket.
Instead, the opportunity cost is that for every OCS-IS commissionee, you have to recruit and bring in the pyramid of guys to get that OCS-IS candidate. Here is the pertinent quote from page 9:
To create these E-6s and E-7s, you had to bring in several privates. Some left after their first term as E-4s (or lower if they were chaptered). Some spent a second term and made E-5 or possibly E-6. Then some of these stuck around for another enlistment and became career, and then the Army accepted them into OCS-IS. Thus, the cost of developing this NCO is the cost of pyramid of folks that we had to enlist and screen and weed out or simply got out. Given the reality that we are drawing nearly half of our OCS-IS candidates from the E-6 and E-7 ranks, this cost is great. Now, I'd agree that you have to discount this some because the Army is getting a service from these other potential future E-6/E-7s, but you simply cannot just dismiss these costs. Also, if you want to use this model, you have to over-acess to allow your E-6/E-7 ranks to be overstrength, or else you would also have to account for the cost of decreasing the quality of your E-6/E-7 ranks by having your better performers go to OCS.At the same time, the U.S. Army has increasingly drawn senior NCOs into OCS. In 1997, only 15 percent of OCS-IS candidates had more than 10 years of enlisted service. By 2007 that percentage had tripled to 45 percent, and a full quarter of these were Sergeants First Class.
Of course, this cost decreases if you select them earlier in their enlisted careers, but then you would see decreasing continuation rates compared to now by OCS-IS.
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