Why Getting Rid of Affirmative Action at Service Academies is Stupid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The fact is that the government isn't making it very appealing for the talented academy, ROTC, and OCS officers to stay.

And they have good options in the private sector. Hegseth has been awful for officer retention.

Hegseth has been great for retention and recruitment - the military services are FINALLY exceeding their recruitment goals not just meeting them unlike the previous administration which had difficulty meeting the goals. Do not provide disinformation and do not politicize educational topics.

Can you post a source?

[Anonymous]

SFFA argued that 80% of Military officers come from OCS and ROTC and if colleges have the affirmative action ban, so should the military academies.

This is confusing to me because state HBCU tend to take lower ranked students, and they have ROTC

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the academies aren’t Harvard or Yale.Getting into an Ivy really does give you a leg up in the private sector. Goldman, McKinsey, Big Law, Silicon Valley—they all recruit heavily from those schools and the name brand opens doors. A state school grad with the same GPA and resume is starting behind. That’s why those admissions battles are so cutthroat.The service academies are completely different. Their only job is to produce military officers. A brand-new 2nd Lieutenant or Ensign from West Point has the exact same starting pay, job, and career path as someone commissioned through ROTC at a random state school, an HBCU, or straight out of OCS. The military doesn’t give extra points for having gone to Annapolis.

You’re all in the same boat. The troops these officers lead—the enlisted force—are already way more diverse and look a lot more like America than the officer corps does. Unless someone is actually proposing we scrap ROTC and OCS completely and make the academies the only way to become an officer—which nobody is—then why single out the academies and strip away their ability to build a more representative class? ROTC and OCS will keep producing diverse officers because they draw from a much wider pool of colleges.


You’d just be making one small commissioning source less diverse while the majority stay the same.The military itself keeps saying a diverse officer corps is essential for unit cohesion, recruitment, retention, and national security. The academies are a tiny fraction of total officers, but they punch above their weight in producing senior leaders 20-30 years down the road.So yeah, I think the academies should keep using race-conscious admissions (within whatever narrow lane the Court left open for national security reasons) to look more like the country. Otherwise we’re just making the problem worse for no reason.

You do not want incompetent (DEI hire) officer in command in battles or wars. Elimination of DEI for the military is even more important than for civilian universities.

100%

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the academies aren’t Harvard or Yale.Getting into an Ivy really does give you a leg up in the private sector. Goldman, McKinsey, Big Law, Silicon Valley—they all recruit heavily from those schools and the name brand opens doors. A state school grad with the same GPA and resume is starting behind. That’s why those admissions battles are so cutthroat.The service academies are completely different. Their only job is to produce military officers. A brand-new 2nd Lieutenant or Ensign from West Point has the exact same starting pay, job, and career path as someone commissioned through ROTC at a random state school, an HBCU, or straight out of OCS. The military doesn’t give extra points for having gone to Annapolis.

You’re all in the same boat. The troops these officers lead—the enlisted force—are already way more diverse and look a lot more like America than the officer corps does. Unless someone is actually proposing we scrap ROTC and OCS completely and make the academies the only way to become an officer—which nobody is—then why single out the academies and strip away their ability to build a more representative class? ROTC and OCS will keep producing diverse officers because they draw from a much wider pool of colleges.


You’d just be making one small commissioning source less diverse while the majority stay the same.The military itself keeps saying a diverse officer corps is essential for unit cohesion, recruitment, retention, and national security. The academies are a tiny fraction of total officers, but they punch above their weight in producing senior leaders 20-30 years down the road.So yeah, I think the academies should keep using race-conscious admissions (within whatever narrow lane the Court left open for national security reasons) to look more like the country. Otherwise we’re just making the problem worse for no reason.

You do not want incompetent (DEI hire) officer in command in battles or wars. Elimination of DEI for the military is even more important than for civilian universities.

80% of Black Military officers come from HBCU

100%

[Anonymous]

I’m retired military officer. ROTC from a state university. Yes, the academy grads did the “same job”… but there is a “ring knocker” circle. Academy grads get the better assignments- higher visibility & looks better for promotion. Academy grads take care of their own, so if two 2nd Lts report to an Academy grad and one of the Lts is an academy grad, he will be rated higher.
One school I went to (career course required for promotion) the academy grads had a “study guide” (aka cheat sheet) passed down year after year just to academy grads. I happened to see it & ask for a copy not knowing it was only for academy grads, and they got upset I saw it. Ultimately turned them in and the school had to redo all the tests since the study guide was literally the tests.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The fact is that the government isn't making it very appealing for the talented academy, ROTC, and OCS officers to stay.

And they have good options in the private sector. Hegseth has been awful for officer retention.

Hegseth has been great for retention and recruitment - the military services are FINALLY exceeding their recruitment goals not just meeting them unlike the previous administration which had difficulty meeting the goals. Do not provide disinformation and do not politicize educational topics.

I highly doubt it. Perhaps in absolute numbers (but I'm not sure of that). But if the military is getting the same level of loser who is joining ICE and violating our civil liberties because Trump has scared idiot Americans into thinking that there are countless bad guys who need to be rooted out by unemployable losers in masks, then that does not make me feel confident in the safety of our country. I think most of them are people who are too dumb to do anything else, rather than leaders who know how to think critically, analyze situations and make important decisions.

The dumbing down of our nation is truly scary. And note that I am generally opposed to DEI - I think that if there is a true "tie" then there are benefits to hiring minorities, but that is not how it has been implemented - they often dig way too deep to hit their DEI quotas and that is not OK.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The fact is that the government isn't making it very appealing for the talented academy, ROTC, and OCS officers to stay.

And they have good options in the private sector. Hegseth has been awful for officer retention.

Hegseth has been great for retention and recruitment - the military services are FINALLY exceeding their recruitment goals not just meeting them unlike the previous administration which had difficulty meeting the goals. Do not provide disinformation and do not politicize educational topics.

It isn’t due to Hegseth. It is financial incentives. Congress approved record pay increases for military personnel over the past three years: 4.6% in 2023, 5.2% in 2024, and 4.5% in 2025. Additionally, junior enlisted received a special 10.5% raise effective April 2025. These increases brought entry-level pay from under $22,000 in 2022 to nearly $28,000 in 2025, making military service more competitive with private-sector jobs.
Larger enlistment bonuses and expanded benefits further sweetened the deal, especially for younger Americans.

[Anonymous]

The academy grads tend to get a boost over ROTC and OCS bc they are generally in it for the career. Whereas ROTC are often four and five and out. And a lot of OCS are pilots, which is a different world.

If you want to be a general, best to go to an academy. If you want to get an MBA or a law degree or work Fortune 500 or consulting, best to go ROTC. Flying is its own world. I do sense the F-22s and F-35s are more likely to go to Academy grads, but it's not a hard rule at all.

[Anonymous]

I’m Latina. My parents were both Army. My DH is a Marine. His father was in the Navy.

I don’t think there should be affirmative action in the service academies.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the academies should be diverse. I do think they should be diverse. Latinos - or my family at least- are service oriented. But I don’t think affirmative action, or even the mere appearance of affirmative action, does us any favors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m Latina. My parents were both Army. My DH is a Marine. His father was in the Navy.

I don’t think there should be affirmative action in the service academies.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the academies should be diverse. I do think they should be diverse. Latinos - or my family at least- are service oriented. But I don’t think affirmative action, or even the mere appearance of affirmative action, does us any favors.

One of the reasons the military worked so well in the past is because they (generally) used the same criteria and expectations for everyone. When people think everyone gets a fair shake, regardless of external criteria it leads to a much stronger organization.

The military hasn’t been even handed for a while, and it hasn’t been good for the services.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/03/navys-personnel-boss-says-getting-rid-of-photos-promotion-boards-hurt-diversity.html

For example, in order to combat assumed discrimination during Navy promotions considerations, they removed the picture from the informational package. This led to fewer diverse candidates getting promotions. So there was discrimination, it was just being practiced against white male candidates. They immediately added the picture back of course; can’t have merit being the primary metric in Biden’s military!

They added the picture back so that they could continue to discriminate.

[Anonymous]

Are we ever going to get past the insulting implications of this obsession for Affirmative Action?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m Latina. My parents were both Army. My DH is a Marine. His father was in the Navy.

I don’t think there should be affirmative action in the service academies.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the academies should be diverse. I do think they should be diverse. Latinos - or my family at least- are service oriented. But I don’t think affirmative action, or even the mere appearance of affirmative action, does us any favors.

One of the reasons the military worked so well in the past is because they (generally) used the same criteria and expectations for everyone. When people think everyone gets a fair shake, regardless of external criteria it leads to a much stronger organization.

The military hasn’t been even handed for a while, and it hasn’t been good for the services.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/03/navys-personnel-boss-says-getting-rid-of-photos-promotion-boards-hurt-diversity.html

For example, in order to combat assumed discrimination during Navy promotions considerations, they removed the picture from the informational package. This led to fewer diverse candidates getting promotions. So there was discrimination, it was just being practiced against white male candidates. They immediately added the picture back of course; can’t have merit being the primary metric in Biden’s military!

They added the picture back so that they could continue to discriminate.

The U.S military is racist and discriminatory. The service academies too.

People need to study U.S. history.

Of all the soldiers who fought for the U.S. in the past wars, who got the G.I. Bill benefits, and who didn’t?

And ironically, with all of the false "DEI " talk, Pete Hegseth leads the military?

GTFOH

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m Latina. My parents were both Army. My DH is a Marine. His father was in the Navy.

I don’t think there should be affirmative action in the service academies.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t think the academies should be diverse. I do think they should be diverse. Latinos - or my family at least- are service oriented. But I don’t think affirmative action, or even the mere appearance of affirmative action, does us any favors.

One of the reasons the military worked so well in the past is because they (generally) used the same criteria and expectations for everyone. When people think everyone gets a fair shake, regardless of external criteria it leads to a much stronger organization.

The military hasn’t been even handed for a while, and it hasn’t been good for the services.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/08/03/navys-personnel-boss-says-getting-rid-of-photos-promotion-boards-hurt-diversity.html

For example, in order to combat assumed discrimination during Navy promotions considerations, they removed the picture from the informational package. This led to fewer diverse candidates getting promotions. So there was discrimination, it was just being practiced against white male candidates. They immediately added the picture back of course; can’t have merit being the primary metric in Biden’s military!

They added the picture back so that they could continue to discriminate.

The U.S military is racist and discriminatory. The service academies too.

People need to study U.S. history.

Of all the soldiers who fought for the U.S. in the past wars, who got the G.I. Bill benefits, and who didn’t?

And ironically, with all of the false "DEI " talk, Pete Hegseth leads the military?

GTFOH

[/quote

Were you a DEI hire let go recently due to your incompetence?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The fact is that the government isn't making it very appealing for the talented academy, ROTC, and OCS officers to stay.

And they have good options in the private sector. Hegseth has been awful for officer retention.

Hegseth has been great for retention and recruitment - the military services are FINALLY exceeding their recruitment goals not just meeting them unlike the previous administration which had difficulty meeting the goals. Do not provide disinformation and do not politicize educational topics.

I highly doubt it. Perhaps in absolute numbers (but I'm not sure of that). But if the military is getting the same level of loser who is joining ICE and violating our civil liberties because Trump has scared idiot Americans into thinking that there are countless bad guys who need to be rooted out by unemployable losers in masks, then that does not make me feel confident in the safety of our country. I think most of them are people who are too dumb to do anything else, rather than leaders who know how to think critically, analyze situations and make important decisions.

The dumbing down of our nation is truly scary. And note that I am generally opposed to DEI - I think that if there is a true "tie" then there are benefits to hiring minorities, but that is not how it has been implemented - they often dig way too deep to hit their DEI quotas and that is not OK.

So lets say that you have two candidates that are similar in every way except SAT score. How much of a gap in SAT score would you tolerate to achieve DEI goals?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Academy grads absolutely have better job prospects when exiting the military (and most do exit when commitment is up), comparable to top 10 colleges, and an amazing alumni network. Top companies recruit academy grads. How did you not know this?

I'll take lies people tell for 100 , Alex

+1