This final chapter summarizes the key points discussed in the previous chapters. It illuminates how diverse adults in the United States helped to build the link between youth, education, and national security from World War I to World War II. The chapter also discusses how this connection both changed and influenced developments in the second half of the twentieth century, when the Cold War changed American ideas about who should serve militarily. Nonetheless, the relationship between youth, education, and national security has remained powerful and continues to influence young Americans today.

Although military issues are not often included in accounts of American society in the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter shows how they influenced young Americans’ access to education by examining debates surrounding mandatory military training that male students in certain secondary schools and colleges that were part of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program had to undergo. These debates illuminate the tensions that existed and grew between access to education and national security throughout these years, as well as the strengthening of the relationship between educational institutions and the military. The ultimate defeat of ROTC’s opponents by the end of the 1930s demonstrates that American society had come to accept the teaching of military subjects in civilian educational institutions.

This chapter reports on results of similar conjoint experiments conducted at the United States Naval Academy and at the London School of Economics. At both institutions, we find pro-diversity preferences that largely complement those from other schools. However, at the Naval Academy we find no preferences in favor of women applicants despite the fact that women are underrepresented among students at the Academy (whereas they make up majorities at most undergraduate institutions), and we find that preferences against gender non-binary applicants and faculty candidates are far stronger at the Naval Academy than at other institutions. At the London School of Economics, we find positive but smaller preferences in favor of blacks but not for East Asian or South Asian applicants but we find strong preferences in favor of applicants from disadvantages socioeconomic backgrounds.