Dallas ? Young lovers Chris White and Beatrice Mahoney sat down and did the math.

He’s 20, she’s 19. They’ve been together three years. Neither has a career, and the national unemployment rate is 9.6 percent.

Here’s what they came up with — the Marine Corps.

“I’ve tried to get jobs everywhere,” White said hours after he and his girlfriend took the oath of enlistment in Dallas.

“I’ve tried connections from family. I even tried to get a job working maintenance in a trailer park. But unless you have experience, it’s almost impossible.”

In some ways, the Fort Worth residents represent a silver lining in the storm clouds of a troubled U.S. economy. Military recruiting has never been better.

For the first time, the four largest branches of the service — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines — are far exceeding their recruiting goals. About 99 percent of enlistees have a high school diploma, and scores on the military entrance exam are the highest in the history of the all-volunteer force.

Those numbers are important, recruiters say, because enlistees with book smarts and discipline are usually easier to train.

“We know that unemployment is stubbornly high, around 9.5 percent, and that’s high by historical standards,” said Curtis Gilroy, the Defense Department’s director of recruiting.

“When jobs are scarce in the civilian sector, the military is relatively attractive as a post-high school option for young people.”

But Gilroy said Army researchers discovered something surprising when they polled new recruits about their reasons for enlisting — “service to country” was the No. 1 response. In recent years, most young soldiers marked “job training” and “educational benefits” as their primary motive for signing up.

Mahoney isn’t surprised.

Her father retired as a master sergeant after 26 years in the Marines, and she’s never really wanted to do anything else.

“It’s pretty much the only thing I know, and I love it to death,” she said. “This is going to be my career.”

As to her boyfriend, Mahoney said she hopes absence will make their hearts grow fonder. She ships out for boot camp in July to Parris Island, S.C., about when he will begin training in San Diego.

After that, she hopes the winds of fate will deposit them at the same base.

“Our drive to be in the military pushed us together,” she said. “I really think this is going to make us stronger.”

Rural areas in the South have always offered fertile soil for recruiters, where patriotism and wanderlust run deep among the military’s target demographic, 18- to 24-year-olds.

“For our region, the numbers speak for themselves,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth, head of the Arlington-based 344th Recruiting Squadron, which covers North Texas and parts of Louisiana and Arkansas.

“We’ve met our goal 118 months straight, and many of our areas are rural.”

Southern states account for 36 percent of the nation’s young adults, according to the Department of Defense, but provide 41 percent of the nation’s recruits. Texas is the top state in the South, supplying around 10 percent of military enlistees each year.

Each year, the services sign up between 280,000 and 300,000 new soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines — and, typically, the services have little problem hitting their numbers.

What does vary is the relative quality of recruits.

When unemployment is low and the economy is riding high, military decision makers are generally more lenient about test scores and more generous with enlistment bonuses.

“Recruiting is all about finding the right people, with the right skills, at the right time, in the right numbers,” Ashworth said. “Recruiting in the United States Air Force has never been more competitive than it is now.”