A unique contribution of our study was the examination of educational attainment in an early-middle-aged sample that, because of the benefits provided by the military, had reduced economic barriers to completing adult education. Xie (1992) conducted an extensive examination of the educational attainment of veteran versus non-veteran U.S. men, and found that veterans exceeded non-veterans in educational attainment sometime between their late 20s and early 30s; prior to that age veterans had lower educational attainment. This later attainment is important to bear in mind in any examination of veteran samples, as assessments with younger veterans might underestimate lifetime educational attainment. In our data, by 1987 52.2% of Vietnam-era veterans had completed some additional formal schooling beyond their education at enlistment, with 24.1% of the sample having 16+ years of education in 1987 compared to 6.7% at military enlistment. Importantly, in our sample the mean years of education (M=14.0) was identical to that observed by Lyons et al. (2006) in their Vietnam Era Twin Study of Aging (which was based on a subsample of the same veterans included in our analyses),
