Recruiters, under pressure to meet end-of-month goals, often work feverishly to meet their monthly recruiting goals. This thesis uses regression models to examine the effects of day of month of enlistment on Marine Corps Recruit Depot attrition percentages to examine the hypothesis that recruiters lower their standards at the end of the month in a final effort to make their monthly recruiting mission. The Total Force Data Warehouse provided data for over 50,000 recruits who enlisted and shipped to recruit training between October 2003 and May 2005. Of those, over 5,500 (10.62 percent) failed to complete the prescribed training. In the logit regression models, discharge was modeled against demographic variables such as age, gender, race, education level, and AFQT score, as well as variables representing the day of the month a recruit enlists (last day, last week, or last 10 days of the month). Prior research has found that DEP attrition is higher for recruits who enter the Marine Corps at the end of the month. By contrast, the data analyzed in this study show that once a Marine Corps enlistee ships to a recruit training depot, there is no statistical evidence of higher attrition rates in basic training based on the day the recruit enlisted.
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