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It's not much of a secret that there has been a relaxing of the standards to allow Athletes, minorities etc... into the academies. But really- SO WHAT? The standard such as it is (and the reality is that there is no standard but there is a norm that most Mids/Cadets fall into for SAT performance etc) is an arbitrary number to winnow the field down to a reasonable number. But is the academic prowess of an 18-21year old much of a measurement of whether someone will be "the best damn officers the Navy can get its hands on?" No I don't believe it is. Correlating admissions criteria to success is pretty tenuous and lots of other factors weigh into the future success of any undergraduate institution which skews an anlysis of performance to begin with- (for example the relative mass of alumni in any one field is at least as high a determinant in succeeding as any other factor. So to generalize- the "best" students go to the Ivy Leagues and then get the "best jobs" etc... but is that becaseu they are the "best" or because we promote those who are in the same mold that we came from?)
It's only been relatively recently that USNA (and the others) have attempted to emulate the Ivy Leagues in who they see as their pool of applicants. Is the country better off for having academies that would have rejected Bull Halsey, John S McCain (any one of the 3 of them) George Patton, Mathew Ridgeway etc...? No. What the takeaway from a discussion of this article should be is to reinforce that there are a lot of arbitrary measurements that simply are unrelated or only marginally related to the mission of the Academies. Athletes have been getting a bye forever, yet once they graduate are they any less successful as combat leaders because as undergraduates they were somewhat less academically prepared in many cases than their peers? No.
Grad/Dad is dead on. Success for the Service Academies is how well they prepare their graduates to lead others into harms way, and some arbitrary academic qualification is not the sole or even a principal determinant of future success. USNA/USMA etc... all do that pretty well- and not because of some SAT score and class rank in HS- but because they inculcate their graduates with a sense of duty, sacrifice and honor. So who cares if USNA has a student pool that is basically restricted to the top 5% of the HS class in terms of test scores and class rank as long as it gets leaders who can lead the USN and the USMC in the conflicts of the future.
"And if this is the case, it will merely indicate that the standards long established for USNA performance were bogus, over-baked, unnecessary."
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