Examining the Association Between Veteran Status and Socioeconomic Status Among American Indian and Alaska Native Men in the USA

In the USA, military service has been proposed as a social mobility opportunity for individuals from socially marginalized backgrounds, specifically that military training and access to benefits aid their civilian socioeconomic status. We examined the association between demographic characteristics and the education level and income level of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) and non-Hispanic white men between the ages of 22 and 83, and consider veteran status as a moderator of socioeconomic status. We used logistic regression on whether the individual holds a bachelor’s degree and OLS regression on logged total income for our analyses. Our research suggests that single-race AIAN active duty veterans for eras between 1975 and 2001 were associated with higher education than their non-veteran counterparts and those who did not serve in these specific active-duty eras. We also found that overall single-race AIAN active-duty veterans for eras between 1975 and 2001 have higher incomes than those AIAN men who did not. Yet, we found that the gains by AIAN veterans were insufficient to close the income gap between AIAN and white men. The study bolsters the literature that inequality continues to persist for AIAN men despite individual pursuits for socioeconomic advancement. Our findings suggest that future research should investigate mechanisms of social mobility for Indigenous Peoples and more fully understand that social and structural forces that limit individual efforts for socioeconomic advancement.