Peridot,
As hard as that Skype must have been last night, but if I were in your shoes, I would look at the bigger picture.
1. Be thankful he is open and honest with you. That is a true compliment to your relationship if he feels at this young age he can
talk to you.
2. Before he addressed it, he already thought about everything...transferring, careers, majors, etc.
3. If he is willing to transfer colleges, than there is the writing on the wall of how much he does not want to serve.
4. He has his cranium on straight. How many of us parents entered college, graduated and remained in a career for decades with regrets? How many of us changed career fields? Better now to enter a field he wants to be in than one he feels he must be in.
You raised an intelligent young man.
5. Your DH is like many parents when their kids take a 180 degree turn. He envisioned in his mind 4 yrs from now on graduation day pinning on those butter bars. He made a Norman Rockwell picture in his mind, and now someone stole that picture.
When he sees that he is happier out of ROTC even if he transfers colleges, he will feel differently.
You are right for your husband this a dream that died. He needs to go through the 5 stages. This is not uncommon, actually it is quite common...especially at the SA's because only 75% of any incoming class will graduate.
P-flying
But some sort of recourse should be applied if you drop.
In the AFROTC world there is a recourse if you are contracted...they demand financial payback of the scholarship. A cadet at our DS's det went to SFT, came back and told the AF he is out. They said fine, but now you owe us 2 yrs of scholarship money. Luckily for him he is an IS student so it is @ 30K and not private.
He had a financial hold put on him and could not register with the school until he paid that back to the AF.
For peridot, there is another silver lining...can you imagine if that child was yours until contract and you now had to find the $$$ for school without the scholarship and owe tens of thousands back?
Not only is your school being paid for, but all the staff that has a vested interest in you, as well as the training that you are going through, it all costs money. Money paid for by tax payers and I am a tax payer.
I understand what you are trying to state, but the fact is ROTC was created to groom/educate officers. This is why when they contract they are required to pay back time for yrs. It is meant to re-coup the costs of the education. An engineer in the corporate world does not start out at 45K marker like an officer in the military. Their starting salaries are much higher, probably closer to 75K (at least in the VA area)...30K more a yr than the military member, multiply that by 4 yrs and the difference is 120K...scholarship tier 7 is up to 18K for 4 yrs or 72K, @50K difference. How many AD work in a det or BN? 5/6/7? That would avg out to be 12.5K per yr going to the staff from that 50K differential. 50 cadets on scholarship and the costs are covered. It works out in the long run from a fiscal standpoint as far as DOD is concerned.
Additionally, if they are not scholarship, it is more like JROTC in HS, they do not get a penny. Do you feel we should not have JROTC in HS?
We are all taxpayers, even the AD military members, we all have a vested interest in our military. There is always a price to pay from that POV.
I am also believer in that they should reimplement the draft and that everyone should serve their country in some way, whether it is as a civilian support or in the military. That also has no bearing on my job.
As a spouse who lived that life for 20 yrs, only out of it 2 yrs ago, I saw way too many people who were there for the wrong reasons(payback time is one of them). Our military is as strong as it is because they volunteer to be there. They want to serve. The ones that are forced to serve usually bring down the morale of the unit because they are unhappy. Unhappy that they didn't get that job. Unhappy that they were forced to move somewhere they didn't want to go to. Unhappy because they can't get into base housing or paying out of pocket for rent. In essence, they are the ones they are unhappy in everything in life because they never wanted to be in the service in the 1st place. Do you want to serve next to them everyday for their 4 yr tour?
I do concur that we should have every person over 18 serve in some fashion the country, be it Peace Corps, government internships (even at the town level) or the military. I just don't believe it has to be military related. This would be the equivalent to the Gap yr that is very common in Europe. It lets them see the world from a different perspective, while understanding how every aspect of our country touches multiple other aspects of the world.