Transparent Standards, Not DEI, Should Guide Admissions at U.S. Military Academies

In many dimensions, the United States military is just as committed to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) as any Ivy League university. Cully Stimson, writing in the Daily Signal, provides an interesting discussion of the Students for Fair Admissions’s (SFFA) case against the United States Naval Academy (USNA). SFFA, the plaintive in last year’s Supreme Court case ruling affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional, wants the USNA and other military academies also to stop using race-conscious admissions. Stimson’s reporting describes how the military academies have, for decades, favored black and Hispanic applicants over other, more qualified, white applicants.

The best way to remove DEI from the U.S. military, or at least from military education, is with transparent standards.

[RELATED: Racial Discrimination Has No Place in Our Military]

The USNA currently uses a “holistic” admissions process. This process provides maximum flexibility to the institution, allowing the USNA to admit students for whatever reasons it chooses.

On the other hand, transparent standards would require that the USNA specify a single score on which it would make its admissions decisions. That score would probably be a function of a measure of intelligence like the SAT or ACT and the candidate’s score on a physical fitness test. The exact formula to construct the score would be public. The anonymized scores of all admitted students—and, potentially, all applicants—would be public, indicating whether they were accepted and enrolled. An admissions process centered around a transparent score would guarantee that the most qualified applicants were accepted, regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other extraneous factor.

This score could be more complex. USNA currently requires a nomination from an official source. By definition, the score for any applicant who does not receive a nomination is zero. The score could include a high school GPA, a measure of the rigor of the courses taken, and a measure of leadership potential, perhaps derived from interviews or recommendations.

Yet, in general, complexity is bad. Transparent standards are best when they are simple.

First, there is little evidence that applicants for any position who do well in a subjective evaluation setting like an interview are more successful than otherwise similar applicants who do not. Interviews don’t work well, but objective tests, both mental and physical, do.

Second, simple standards are harder to game.

Elite universities, for the most part, thumb their noses at the Supreme Court’s decision to outlaw affirmative action in admissions. By using holistic admissions and a variety of subjective inputs, they will make it very hard to prove, at least in a court of law, that they are discriminating against white and Asian applicants. Simpler, more objective standards make such subterfuge difficult, if not impossible.

Third, simple standards generate trust. Nothing is more poisonous to esprit de corps than unfair advantages. A military in which the same standards judge everyone is better than one in which irrelevant attributes matter.

[RELATED: Diversity Is a Trojan Horse]

Fourth, simple standards allow for a direct attack on the contentious issue of barring women from combat, as Peter Hegseth, nominee for Secretary of Defense, has proposed. If the USNA had the same standards for women as it has for men, the vast majority of women would not be able even to enroll, much less serve in combat.

Is the incoming Trump Administration serious about removing DEI from the U.S. military? Perhaps. Look toward the nominations for lower-level positions in the Pentagon. If, for example, the incoming Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, the civilian official most directly involved in USNA admissions, has never written an article like this one or is unwilling to speak directly to this issue during confirmation hearings, then little is likely to change.

Photo by United States Naval Academy Photo Archive on Flickr