75 Chapter Three PAYING FOR COLLEGE: A SURVEY OF MILITARY AND CIVILIAN FINANCIAL AID PROGRAMS AND POSTSECONDARY EDUCATION COSTS C. Christine Fair INTRODUCTION College Attendance and the Challenge to Recruiting Recent difficulties by the services in meeting recruitment targets are in part a result of the business cycle. The civilian labor market expe- rienced a long period of robust growth in the 1990s; the unemploy- ment rate, which was 7.3 percent in January 1992, declined to 4.7 percent in January 1998 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1998). However, there is reasonable evidence to suggest that difficulties in meeting recruitment targets are not transitory and will not be mitigated by a contraction of the labor market. Rather, Asch et al. (1999) have sug- gested that these difficulties may stem in part from permanent changes within the civilian labor market that have made civilian op- portunities more attractive to high-quality youth. Specifically, the labor-market return to attending college has risen dramatically. The college premium—the percentage difference be- tween the real wages of a four-year college graduate and a high school graduate—increased from 40 percent in 1979 to 65 percent in 1995 (Mishel et al., 1997, cited by Asch et al., 1999). Although the 4.3 percent increase in the real wage of the college graduate may account for some of this premium, most of it can be attributed to the 11.8 percent decrease in the average real wage of high school graduates