In 2023, the vast majority of active duty U.S. Armed Forces personnel did not have a college degree. In that year, there were 822,729 United States Armed Forces personnel who had at least earned a high school diploma but did not have a Bachelor's degree.

In 2022 in the United States, about 5.06 million veterans had attained a Bachelor's degree or higher. In that same year, around 5.91 million veterans had some college or an associate's degree.

37 of the United States' 45 presidents (officially 46 as Grover Cleveland is counted as both the 22nd and 24th president) attended a university, college or other institution of higher education; 34 of these completed their studies and graduated. After completing their undergraduate studies, twenty U.S. presidents attended a graduate school, with eleven attaining a qualification (seven of which were law degrees). Only eight U.S. presidents, including two of the most highly regarded, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, did not attend college, while all presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower have attained some form of degree or equivalent qualification.

Institutions Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher education in the U.S., has the highest number of presidential alumni, with eight in total. Of the eight Ivy League schools, widely regarded as the most prestigious universities in the United States, five include U.S. presidents among their alumni, and fifteen U.S. presidents have attained a qualification these universities. Only two U.S. presidents have studied abroad; they were John Quincy Adams, who studied at Leiden University in the Netherlands while his father was stationed in Europe, and Bill Clinton, who studied at Oxford University in England. John F. Kennedy had planned to study at the London School of Economics, but fell ill after enrolling and transferred stateside to Princeton, before illness again forced his withdrawal a few months later. Two U.S. presidents founded universities; the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson (and attended by Woodrow Wilson), and the State University of New York at Buffalo was founded by Millard Fillmore; one of the eight U.S. presidents who never attended college. Donald Trump did establish a company called "Trump University" in 2004, however this provided training for potential property realtors, and was not an educational institution (in 2016, Trump paid 25 million U.S. dollars to settle a lawsuit with the State of New York, as Trump University was deemed to have defrauded customers and made false statements).

Most educated presidents

In 1751, John Adams was the first future-president to go to college, entering Harvard at the age of sixteen, and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1755. The most recent presidential graduate is Barack Obama, who attended Occidental College from 1979 to 1981, before transferring to Columbia University where he majored in political science, graduating in 1983; Obama later obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1991. Woodrow Wilson is the only U.S. president to have obtained a Ph.D., which he received from Johns Hopkins University in 1886 for his work titled "Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics", and George W. Bush is the only U.S. president to have attained an MBA degree. Three U.S. presidents attended military universities, with both Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower graduating from West Point Military Academy, and Jimmy Carter graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy (Eisenhower also attended three other U.S. Army colleges during his military career, which began in 1915 and ended in 1969). Incumbent President Donald Trump obtained a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.

The United States military conscripted approximately 1.9 million service personnel into their ranks over the course of the Vietnam War. Commonly known as the draft, conscription had been conducted in the U.S. through the Selective Service System (SSS) since 1917. Initially, the draft was conducted using a random ballot by the SSS. When a person was called up by the draft, they had to report to their local draft board to evaluate their draft status. The various exemptions which draft-eligible men could use to avoid service, such as still being in university education or being medically unfit, were thought to allow better-connected and middle class men to evade the draft more easily than working class or minority men. The SSS responded to criticism of the draft system by conducting draft lotteries beginning in 1969. These draft lotteries were conducted based on birth dates, with the probability of conscription being higher for those men with birth dates which were selected earlier in the lottery. The lotteries were televised events, with millions of Americans tuning in. Opposition and the end of the draft
Conscription fueled anti-war attitudes among the public in the United States, particularly among young men eligible for service and student protesters on university campuses. Anti-war student groups began to organize events where students were encouraged to burn their draft cards in an act of defiance. Resistance to the draft grew throughout the conflict, with more people filing as conscientious objectors to the war in 1972 than actual inductees via the draft. Some of those who could not evade being drafted through the various exemptions available chose to flee the United States to countries such as Canada. Recent estimates suggest up to 100,000 men left the U.S. during this period for this reason. Due to the draft's role in driving anti-war sentiment, civil disobedience making its use untenable, and growing evidence that an all-volunteer military would be more effective, Richard Nixon campaigned in the 1968 presidential election to abolish the draft. The draft was finally ended in 1973, with the last conscripted men entering the U.S. military on June 30 of that year.