Naval Academy Professor Exposes Two-Tiered Admissions

Last month we blogged about the Center for Equal Opportunity’s study, “Racial, Ethnic and Gender Preferences in Admissions to the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Naval Academy,” which concluded that both service academies lowered admissions standards for black admittees. Professor Bruce Fleming, who teaches at the Naval Academy, exposes how the school assesses applicants based on race. An excerpt from his opinion piece:

“A vote of ‘qualified’ for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine ‘qualified’ white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of ‘not qualified’ for white applicants.

“Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our ‘number one priority.’ For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.”

Read it again, and understand what’s going on. This is not affirmative action. This separate-track admissions practice is how colleges and universities across the country achieve skin deep-only diversity. Admitting students without regard to race would produce a freshman class of too few blacks, how ever these schools define “too few blacks.” To overcome this “embarrassing” obstacle, they assess blacks students against one another, not against the general pool of applicants. Consequently, black students generally are admitted with lower grades and scores than whites and Asians.

It’s patently unfair, but that’s how it works.

The blogosphere recently buzzed over the Naval Academy’s widely reported “commitment” to diversity. The academy has twice as many blacks and Hispanics as it did 10 years ago, and the increase is the result of “a blitz of 1,000 outreach and recruitment events across the country.” (Source)

If only that were so, it would be the stuff from which affirmative action is made! The so-called blitz produced a pool of underqualified applicants who were admitted because they were minorities. As Fleming notes, diversity comes at a price. Interviewed for the Washington Post article, he said, “First of all, we’re dumbing down the Naval Academy. Second of all, we’re dumbing down the officer corps.”

The Naval Academy may boast that 76 percent of its 2013 class comes from the top 20 percent of their high school classes, the same proportion as 10 years ago, but “top 20 percent” doesn’t mean much if minorities are coming from schools with mostly low-achieving students.