Quote:
Originally Posted by facts101
What are the reasons why someone would not be an officer when they join the Navy with a Bachelor's degree?
Do many people join the Navy with a Bachelor's degree and not become an officer right away?
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On subs it is fairly common to see crewmen with college degrees.
When I reported aboard my first boat I was among the first wave of recruits to not have a college degree.
During the VN draft many guys went to college, while in college their number may have been drawn but by being in college their draft was 'deferred'. So long as they staying in college they had a deferment from being drafted. The problem being that once they finished their Bachelor's degree they would soon get a letter requiring them to report to the draft board. What some of them did was in the last few weeks before graduation they went to a Navy recruiter and had a conversation. They signed-up for subs and enlisted before they graduated from college. Then after their graduation ceremony they went directly to Navy Bootcamp and eventually onto a sub. It was a manner in which they could 'dodge the draft' and avoid being cannon-fodder in VN.
I came of age and enlisted soon after VN, so when I hit the fleet what I saw was the Silent Service was predominately college grads [former 'Draft Dodgers'].
During my career it was very common for submariners to get a college degree. I often heard that the easiest degree to get was in Psychology, you read books and understand some theories, but there is no right or wrong. So long as you can understand a bunch of over-lapping theories [which could all easily be wrong in the first place] and write essays on each of them then your good.
I took a lot of correspondence courses on different things.
Many of our officers have PHDs, so to pad their resumes and 'Professional Evaluations' they will teach various college courses while underway. I attended many college courses while underwater.
The DOD awards a contract to a University to provide correspondence courses for a couple years. Then the DOD gives the contract to a different university every couple years. The effect being that we collect a lot of credit-hours on transcripts from different schools, none of which will recognise the others. I had to get my degrees via matriculation.
Degrees are fairly common among sub crews.
I have seen a few guys who did submit packages for selection into OCS programs.
One friend of mine [Victor] already had a B.S. in Math from a WV college, and was selected into an OCS program at Purdue. He spent 4-years in their NROTC program studying physics, in his last semester he flunked his classes. By the time the program dropped him back into the fleet, he had already made up the flunked classes and had a clean transcript. Back as Active Duty enlisted in the Navy he only had a year left on his enlistment, that was when I met up with him once again. A year left on his original enlistment and he still had 4-years of GI bill due to him, so he planned to go back to college to use up his GI-bill. I have no idea how many degrees he finally finished.
The Navy is very specific in what fields your degree must be in, in order to be a 'Officer of the Line' [or commonly stated a Line-Officer].
The only officer allowed on subs that is not a Line-Officer is the Chop, and he must have an accounting degree. As Chop his career is limited, he will never climb above CDR.
Our Line-Officers are mostly Engineers with a few Physicists. Their career path is very difficult. Every year a third of the O-1s [ensigns] are thinned out, they have a specific window in which they must make advancement to O-2 [LTJG] or else their commission will not be renewed. Roughly at each pay-grade it works about the same, they each have a 3-year window in which they must make advancement, or else they lose their commission. So it gets very cut-throat. Any black-mark from among the men who work for you, and your career can be over.
Life underwater can be very stressful, life in the weird room is far worse.
One common misconception is about pay. High ranking officers, O6 [Captain] and above with over 20-years of service, do receive a lot of base-pay. However junior officers do not receive as much, and they do not qualify for all of the allowances and bonus money that enlisted men get.
On my last boat, as an E6 going to sea, I earned more pay then each of the officers we had onboard below O5 [CDR]. One of my duties was 'Command Financial Specialist' and 'Tax Preparer' which meant that among other duties I filed income tax forms for nearly all of our crewmen [and our officers]. I saw every-one's income and I facilitated workshops of investment planning strategies and tax-shelters. For many of us, to have pushed a package for OCS and to be selected we would suffer a significant drop in pay.
Among the fellow crewmen who had degrees that I knew, very few wanted that extra level of stress and the pay cut.
There have been a few different OCS programs where an enlisted man can submit a package and possibly be selected for a commission. Usually these programs make that servicemember an LDO [Limited Duty Officer]. Subs do not have any LDOs so these men disappear from our fleet. I really know very little about LDOs.
LDOs are limited in how high they can be promoted up to, and since they are not Line-Officers they can never command any vessel.
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