By David Kane  |  Minding the Campus

From the Military Times:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has barred the U.S. military service academies from considering race, gender or ethnicity in their admissions processes, ending the practice of affirmative action upheld by the Supreme Court two years ago.

This is an easy order for Hegseth to give. But it will be hard for him, much less for Congress and the public, to know that the order is being followed.

How can we be sure that the service academies are no longer practicing affirmative action—a policy which they have implemented for decades—without monitoring the private conversations held within each admission committee?

The solution is transparency. Each service academy should publish a spreadsheet with a row for every applicant, anonymized, each year. Key columns would include:

Sex: The new federal definitions make this simple.

Race: Whatever racial definitions the individual academies use would be fine, even if they differ.

Tests: Provide the scores for any standardized tests taken by large numbers of applicants and used in the admissions process. This includes the SAT, ACT, and, starting soon, the CLT. The academies are often very interested in the scores on the math subtests, so the component scores should be provided.

Candidate Fitness Assessment: All the service academies use the same physical fitness test, the Candidate Fitness Assessment. Include the overall and subtest scores.

Merit-Based Scores: Hegseth’s memo mentions “merit-based scores.” It is unclear what these will or should be. Currently, each service academy has its own procedure for determining an overall applicant score, which combines academic performance, physical fitness, and other factors. At West Point, it is called the Whole Candidate Score (WCS). Whatever the formula or nomenclature, this score must be made public. Without doing so, none of us can be sure that affirmative action has ended. We need the component parts and the overall score.

Nomination Category: The details behind the nomination process for service academies are complex. Regardless, we need some details to better understand why some high-scoring applicants were not admitted.

Other Variables: Service academies should have the option of providing any other variables that they feel are important to their admissions process.

Decision: Whether the candidate is admitted or not.

Enrollment: Whether the candidate, if admitted, actually enrolled. If not, note where the candidate went instead.

In his memo, the Secretary noted that “Merit-based scores may give weight to unique athletic talent or other experiences such as prior military service or performance at a MSA preparatory school.”

Close observers of the service academies know that this is an indirect reference to those dimensions, other than race, on which the academies are most likely to violate commonsense notions of “merit.” That is, the students at West Point with the lowest Whole Candidate Scores are often those in these categories.

To get a sense of this dynamic, we need some more columns in the spreadsheet:

Athletic Talent: Hegseth uses the phrase “unique athletic talent.” This most likely refers to applicants who have been designated and/or recruited by coaches. At the Naval Academy, for example, such applicants are referred to as “Blue Chip Athletes.” This category makes up 15 percent to 20 percent of enrolled cadets, so a field in the spreadsheet should specify whether or not an applicant is in this group. (I have argued that athletics should play no role in service academy admissions, but if it is going to be important, then its influence should be transparent.)

Prior Military Service: It is unclear how the service academies should or will handle this category. One choice is to change the definition of the overall score so that veterans receive 100, or whatever, points added to their overall score. The key point remains transparency. We (Hegseth, Congress, the public) need to understand the reasons behind admissions decisions.

MSA Attendance: The military academy preparatory schools are, currently, the biggest cheat in the entire process, precisely because they use an opaque admissions process and are overwhelmingly only available to candidates favored by the service academy leadership. Leave a detailed discussion of those issues for another day. For the purpose of the spreadsheet, we just need to know whether or not a candidate attended an MSA.

I also recommend such transparency for those seeking to monitor the admissions process at elite schools like Harvard. But private institutions may reasonably complain about federal overreach.

The service academies, as component parts of the executive branch, have no excuse for being opaque.

Affirmative action has been a critical component of service academy admissions for decades. The members of their admissions committees would almost certainly like to maintain it, if only to ensure that there are enough black and Hispanic cadets.

Transparency is the best way for Hegseth, Congress, and the public to be certain the service academies are now following “merit-based admissions processes.”

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David Kane is the former Preceptor in Statistical Methods and Mathematics in the Department of Government at Harvard University.

First published on Minding the Campus