When most people think of military life, they think of days gone by, when service members and their families lived a relatively secluded life on a military base, sheltered from the ups and downs experienced by their civilian counterparts.

Those days, romanticized in countless Hollywood movies, are long gone. Today, two-thirds of all military members and their families live in the local civilian community.

Chief among the reasons for this is the dramatically different demographic makeup of the armed forces. Gone are the days when the force was composed largely of single, young men, most of whom lived in the barracks. Now, with an all-volunteer force, an ever-increasing percentage of service members are married or are single parents, and there is not nearly enough housing for them on the base. Therefore, most of them live in the local civilian community.

Whereas in the past, military quality of life studies focused on life on the military installation, these old measurements clearly do not reflect the current reality. If you want to know how our service members and their families are living, you need to look at the environment off-base because that’s where they live.

There’s an old saying in the military, “If mama’s not happy, nobody’s happy,” that serves as a metaphor for measuring quality of life. It’s the family issues that matter. Everything else is secondary.

While traditional measurements have tended to focus on big city cultural amenities like opera, theater, French restaurants and the like, for most Americans quality of life means being able to afford to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle. Not that “culture” is unimportant, but it pales in comparison to the day-to-day necessities involved in raising a family.

In fact, if you were to ask the vast majority of Americans how they define quality of life, the top two items on their list would be affordable housing and good public schools.

Home ownership has been a cornerstone of the American Dream since the founding of this country, and the fact that it is an achievable goal for the vast majority of Americans is what makes this country the envy of the rest of the world. The ability to be able to afford a decent and safe place in which to raise a family is at the core of the American fabric and acts as a magnet to less fortunate people throughout the world.

Access to quality public education is the other cornerstone of the American Dream because it opens up the opportunity for anyone, through talent and hard work, to grab for the brass ring of wealth and success that is available in abundance in this great country.

As part of a joint project with the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Military Communities and Family Policy, Expansion Management has created a variant upon its annual “Quality of Life Quotient™” that compares the relative quality of life among 119 civilian metro areas that host a U.S. military installation. We call this study the “2004 Military Communities of Excellence.”

In this study, we looked at the civilian community, not the military installation, and compared it against 354 metropolitan areas throughout the country according to 12 general categories: public schools, housing affordability, standard of living, recreation and leisure, health care, crime and safety, spouse employment opportunities, eligibility for in-state college tuition, continuing education opportunities, affordable childcare, traffic and commuting, and commercial air service.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Education is the key to upward mobility, and being able to send your children to high quality public schools may be the most important quality-of-life issue.

Fortunately, the Defense Department schools (DODDS and DDESS) are among the best in the nation, and children attending those schools usually find themselves ahead of, rather than behind, their peers. Unfortunately, those schools are available only on-base or overseas.

Most children of military service members will attend school in the local civilian community. That’s because the vast majority of military families live off-base and, as we all know, not all of those schools are anywhere near as good as the DODDS/DDESS schools.

As many military parents can tell you, recovering from a three-year tour at a bad school may take a child several years to overcome, if it can be overcome at all. It’s small consolation to have made straight A’s in a school where half the students couldn’t even read. Click here to read the article: (“Educating Kids in a Turbulent Environment”)

HOUSING AFFORDABILITY

For the vast majority of Americans, home ownership is a time-tested way to establish wealth. In fact, for the average family, it is the primary way they are ever going to build wealth.

The main challenge for service families is that they move all the time. Not only that, since they will likely only be in a place for two or three years, they constantly run the risk of being stuck with a house they cannot sell when they are transferred to a new duty station.

Just like living in a community with bad schools, spending a three-year assignment in a metro where you either can’t afford to buy a home or strongly risk losing money on the home you did buy represents a significant lost opportunity for a military family to build some equity that they can use during their ultimate transition to civilian life. Click here to read the article: (“Nothing Ties a Family to a Community Like Home Ownership”)

STANDARD OF LIVING

This category tries to measure where an individual’s income will go the farthest while, at the same time, not being mired in an area of extreme poverty.

Military incomes are the same wherever a service member is stationed.

Sure, the Department of Defense (DOD) has a series of living and housing allowances that vary from place to place, depending upon a location’s relative cost of living. While these allowances enable military families to live in high cost areas, they are borne by the employer (DOD) and are necessary only because the cost of living in the local civilian community is higher than average.

Taxes are also an important consideration. While service members, in most cases, are not subject to state income taxes when assigned to a state that is not their legal residence, their spouses are. In today’s society, dual-income families are the norm, not the exception, and state and local tax rates have an impact on the disposable income of military families, just as they do on their civilian counterparts. Click here to read the article: (“Quality of Life Means Being Able to Enjoy a Decent Standard of Living”)

RECREATION & LEISURE

A community’s recreation and leisure activities go a long way toward enhancing the quality of life enjoyed by its residents. Access to public parks and sporting venues, among other family-friendly activities, enable people to wind down from their otherwise stressful lives. Click here to read the article: (“Recreational Time Gives Families Chance to Re-Energize and Reconnect”)

HEALTH CARE COSTS

With the end of the Cold War, we have dramatically reduced the size of our armed forces, as well as the infrastructure that supported it.

A byproduct of this process has been the dramatic reduction of on-base military health care services and the transfer of responsibility, especially for military dependents, from large on-base military hospitals to the TRICARE military health system, which relies heavily on the local civilian health care resources to provide care.

As a result, military families now must rely on the same providers as do their civilian counterparts, which means that price and acceptance of TRICARE “health insurance” are now important considerations when evaluating the quality and availability of a community’s health care.

Although not included as a specific factor in this year’s study, the acceptance of TRICARE insurance will become an increasingly significant issue for military families. About 23 percent of doctors in the United States no longer accept new Medicare patients because the payments they receive often do not even cover their costs, according to a 2003 survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians.

This is an unsettling omen that looms over all other government-sponsored health insurance plans. Click here to read the article: (“Quality Medical Care Is Conducive to Good Living”)

CRIME & SAFETY

If you have to worry about being assaulted in your neighborhood, or about having your car stolen from in front of your house, it doesn’t matter how good everything else is. No one wants to live in a high crime area because the fear of crime takes away one’s sense of freedom and liberty. Simple things we normally take for granted — walking to school, going to the grocery store, even leaving a window open on a hot summer night — become risky actions in a neighborhood that is victimized by crime.

It’s difficult to put into words just how important it is for service members — facing regular, unaccompanied deployments throughout the world — to know that their families back home are safe and secure. Living in a community where parents are afraid to allow your children to play outdoors would be like living in a prison.

Yet there are many metro areas throughout the country where violent crime and property crime are serious issues. While these cities may otherwise have many fine attributes, crime is a life-and-death issue that is hard to ignore or minimize. Click here to read the article: (“A Crime-Free Environment Is Crucial to Quality of Life”)

SPOUSE EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

The need for a second income is just as important for military families as it is for the rest of the population. The transient nature of military life, however, puts an added burden on spouses, who must face an entirely different job market every couple of years.

As with families everywhere, having a second income is important to military families attempting to make ends meet. In addition to the extra income, many spouses need to maintain currency in their chosen profession, or they need to work for self-esteem and personal satisfaction.

Too often, spouse employment opportunities are evaluated from the perspective of a family that lives in government housing and is looking for a job either on-base or within five minutes of the main gate.

With more than 66 percent of military families already living in the nearby civilian community, however, you need to look at the entire metro area in order to get a true picture of the job market for military spouses. Click here to read the article: (“Military Spouses Face Added Employment Challenges”)

IN-STATE COLLEGE TUITION

For American families everywhere, the issue of college tuition is a major financial worry. After all, next to buying a home, college represents the most significant expense most families will ever face.

For military families with dependents at or approaching college age, the issue of college tuition is especially worrisome.

Most families tend to limit their college choices to nearby colleges and universities in their home state. The reasons are simple: proximity to family and cost.

The issue of cost drives families to choose a college or university in their state of residence. The difference between tuition rates for in-state and out-of-state students is significant and represents a major financial burden for most American families.

However, differing tuition rates are not the only issue here: Most state colleges and universities also have higher — in many cases, significantly higher — admission standards for out-of-state students than they do for in-state students.

Making a distinction between in-state and out-of-state students is clearly a perfectly reasonable thing for states to do. After all, their colleges and universities are funded, in large part, through state taxes and fees paid primarily by state residents.

What makes this a problem for most military families is that, given the exaggerated mobility of today’s armed forces, staying in one place long enough to establish residency in a state is often problematic. It is not uncommon for a typical service member to move 15 to 20 times in a typical military career.

In addition, military service members go where they are told to go, when they are told to go. This makes it difficult to plan college attendance for dependent children. After all, the family of a military dependent entering ninth grade may move several times — to different states, perhaps to different countries — before he or she eventually graduates from high school.

What happens, for example, if the military sponsor is transferred during the dependent child’s senior year of high school? What happens if the sponsor is transferred while the dependent child is in the midst of pursuing a college degree?

Unfortunately, there is no real consistency among states on how they apply in-state tuition status for military service members and their families assigned to duty at a location within that state.

The good news is that the situation has improved during the past couple of years, particularly when it comes to clarifying the often vague statutes and regulations that many states had on the books. Click here to read the article: (“Military Orders Can Impact College Eligibility and Cost”)

CONTINUING EDUCATION OPPORTUNITY

The armed services traditionally have provided a path for upward mobility to its members, and it is education that provides the light for that path.

The military community, perhaps more than most other segments of society, place an extraordinarily high premium on education because they understand, firsthand, its importance to their lives. For them, education never stops, regardless of a person’s age.

The non-commissioned officer and warrant officer ranks are full of individuals who entered the service with a high school diploma — perhaps not even that — and, by taking night courses for a decade or more at a variety of duty stations all over the world, finally earn a bachelor’s degree or higher.

For the officer corps, having an advanced degree is becoming the norm. Most of these advanced degrees are earned by mid-grade officers at night and on weekends, combat deployments permitting.

Obviously, urban areas provide a major advantage for military men and women seeking to further their education because of the proximity to colleges, universities and trade schools. Generally, more degree program choices are available within driving distance of a base in larger cities.

That’s not to say that all is lost when it comes to military bases in rural or isolated areas. Most military bases offer undergraduate- and graduate-level courses provided by university extension services. However, the choice of courses is understandably limited and, at best, these programs mainly help make a bad situation less bad. Click here to read the article: (“Urban Bases Hold an Edge for Learning-Minded Troops”)

AFFORDABLE CHILDCARE

Affordable childcare is just as important for military families as it is for their civilian neighbors. This is particularly true in the case of single military parents, many of whom do not work the traditional 9-to-5 schedule.

For them, the challenge is to find childcare that is affordable (the military has never been known for its high wages), flexible (odd hours that do not always coincide with the traditional business day) and reliable.

Providing high quality and reliable childcare services is something the DOD has placed a high priority on, much more so than in the civilian population at large. Making sure that childcare facilities are certified is especially important.

In the absence of national industry-wide standards, however, it is difficult to quantify and compare cities and states based upon certification. As such, cost remains the primary measuring stick. Click here to read the article: (“Quality Childcare Provides Peace of Mind for Military Families”)

TRAFFIC & COMMUTING

In years past, traffic congestion off-base would be little noticed by service members and their families because a larger percentage lived in government quarters and, therefore, were not forced to contend with traffic delays their civilian counterparts had grown accustomed to. Those days are long past for most service families.

Nowadays, with two-thirds of military service members and their families living in the civilian community, a metro area’s traffic patterns are now part of their everyday life. Not only do they face the same traffic delays as do their civilian counterparts, they also must contend with traffic snarls entering and exiting the military installation.

In addition, for those military families who do live in government quarters on the installation, the cutbacks in hospitals and other services mean that, increasingly, they are forced to seek those services in the local civilian community. Click here to read the article: (“There’s More to Life Than Sitting in Traffic”)

COMMERCIAL AIR SERVICE

For military families who spend most of their adult lives geographically separated from family and friends, access to air travel at a reasonable cost helps keep the ties to home alive.

It always seems as if military families are never stationed anywhere near their hometown. Consequently, having access to an airport with outbound passenger service is an important quality of life consideration in terms of service members and their families being able to visit friends and relatives, and vice versa.

Being able to visit parents — or to have parents visit periodically to help out, or just to provide comfort and reassurance — helps make the sense of isolation seem less harsh. Click here to read the article: (“Commercial Air Access Is Critical for Military Families”)

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

Obviously, some metros scored well in our study and others didn’t. Almost all of them, however, were strong in at least a few categories, while even the top-ranked metros were weak in some categories.

What is most useful about these rankings is that they allow one to take a particular category — public education or housing affordability, for instance — and compare a particular metro area against other metro areas. It also enables one to look at a particular metro area across the board and see its strengths and weaknesses, at least in these particular categories.

Above all else, though, what we have tried to measure are the things that are truly important to middle class American families as they seek to enjoy the bounty this great country has to offer.

Click here to read the commentary: (“Without Families, There Would Be No Military”)

Click here to read the commentary: (“For Spouses, It’s the Waiting That’s the Hardest Part”)

Bill King is the chief editor of Expansion Management magazine and can be reached at BillKing@Penton.com.