Reply to Why Getting Rid of Affirmative Action at Service Academies is Stupid

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[quote=Anonymous]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.[/quote]

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