Are there a lot of veterans in IT?

About a week ago a friend remarked to me that a lot of the IT workers he knew were military veterans. We wondered first whether this was true--that is, is it the case that with a high chance if you're talking with an IT guy, you're talking with a military vet--and we also wondered what might cause this.

Easy question #1 can be answered with the March Current Population Survey (CPS). The March CPS is an annual survey of about 60,000 households, which, according to the data I'm looking at from IPUMS, leads to about 200,000 total respondents each year.

Using this data, I calculate, for each occupation category, the proportion of respondents who report themselves as military veterans. Overall, approximately 7.83% of the respondents used in these calculations are veterans.

These proportions are presented in the following collapsible bar chart. There are 23 occupation categories, each containing particular occupations (there are over 500 different occupations in these data). Click on a occupation category to toggle its subcategories.

To answer my friend's question, let's see... where would "an IT guy" be? Probably what we had in mind is in the "Installation, Maintenance, and Repair" category, maybe "Electronic ... equipment installers and repairers". Those occupations do hover around 20% veteran, suggesting that our thoughts might be somewhat accurate.

Poking around some more does suggest that being a military veteran changes occupational choices later in life in ways that are really quite intuitive given the kinds of human capital obtained while in service. This is interesting in light of media attention surrounding the purported lack of employability of military veterans, e.g. Fortune, CNN, Citizen-Times. Maybe some veterans are able to earn higher wages by exploiting their military-earned human capital.

Methods and data sources

The data was obtained from IPUMS. In this analysis, I restrict to the years 2003 to 2010, over which the Census occupation codes remained constant. I also restrict attention to people asked about their veteran status (which requires the person to be over 15 or 17, depending on the year). About 32% of the remaining sample does not have an occupation category, almost always because they are not in the labor force (being an unemployed new worker also leads to not having an occupation category, but unemployed workers do have an occupation category specified).

Hypothesis: in pro-voucher states, minority students are more likely to attend private schools

The evidence looks to be in favor of this hypothesis. In states that the Heritage foundation says are highly pro-voucher, the proportion of private school students who are minorities is about 3-4% larger than expected. The difference is significant at the p=0.05 level.

In the average state, the proportion of private school students who are minority is about 12%, while the average state is about 28% minority in all K12 schools. So, 3-4% is a meaningful difference.

Mapping voucher programs in the United States

In an earlier post I discussed the work of Saporito and Sohoni, who used the Common Core of Data to find that more white children attend private schools than black or hispanic children, and moreover, when there is a private school nearby, the neighborhood public school has fewer-than-expected white students.

An insightful comment by Robert Kahn suggested that these differences might be smaller in places where there are voucher programs targeting the poor, funding private school attendance for these children.

Embarassingly, I didn't know much about the current state of voucher programs in the US. So here we go.

Gerrymandered school attendance zones? The recent work of Richards and Stroub

Thinking about the possible determinants of the shape of school attendance zones, Richards and Stroub ask: are they drawn to increase or decrease racial segregation?

They call this "attendance zone gerrymandering."

Their findings are presented in two recent papers: Richards (2014) and Richards and Stroub (2015). Roughly, the answer is yes, attendance zones do seem to be gerrymandered, possibly to increase racial segregation.

Is switching schools bad? According to Burkam et. al., the ECLS-K says: not really.

Imagine it’s October, and there’s a struggling first grader just getting to know his classmates, the teacher, which bus number is his, etc. Then his unemployed father gets a well-paid job in another state. They pack up and leave in a week.

Research tends to show (though this is not as consistent as you might think!) that when students switch schools, grades go down.

The relationship between tax rates and property values for NYS school districts

It is often said by sensible people that poor school districts impose higher school tax rates in order to obtain the same local revenues per pupil as rich districts. Let's see if this is true.