They Don't Make Service Academy Graduates Like We Used to

One of the great constants of all things is the belief by any given service academy graduate that their class was the last real class there ever would be. All others that followed were some softer version of things that bowed to the pressures of a world gone mad with progress. True reverence is held for the olden days when ships were made of wood and men were made of steel, because they just don’t make service academy graduates like they used to anymore.

I’m glad they don’t, and you should be too. The world has moved on, and so have America’s service academies. As you might have caught from the news, we’re gearing up for a spirited debate about so-called “woke” cultural corrosion within our storied institutions, spurred by a flurry of directives from the second Trump administration. As a member of the true last real class of the Naval Academy, I have some thoughts.

First, it’s impossible to talk about service academies without acknowledging the massive crisis of trust currently plaguing American higher education institutions. From ballooning tuition costs and massive administrative bloat to political extremism to an uncertain value in the age of AI, opinions of the American university environment are at a low. Through that lens of suspicion, it’s unavoidable that high-profile, 100% taxpayer-funded institutions providing the backbone of the American military officer corps would fall under scrutiny. And they should. But we need to anchor that scrutiny in reality—or we’re going to end up tumbling down the rabbit hole of cultural politics and risk doing more harm than good to some pretty important places.

It starts by acknowledging that, more than anything else, the directives coming out of the Department of Defense eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are political. As much as we’re supposed to keep politics out of national defense, the culture of the military force is inherently and historically quite political. The current administration campaigned and won on a platform of changing the culture of the U.S. Federal Government, which includes the Department of Defense and the academies. Now that the political storm is upon us, it’s important to separate the message that gets sold by the administration from the actual intent of the directives. In politics, they’re usually not the same thing.

What’s being sold by current DOD leadership is that, broadly, DEI initiatives have lowered the standards for non-negotiable vocations like military leadership and, in turn, created a systemic rot that weakens the military. The academies are some of several examples being made. Of course, the erosion of standards and the ensuing cultural rot, if true, should be something we’re all deeply concerned about, politics be damned. The problem is that there isn’t any evidence of the alleged lowering of standards—or “hijacking by woke leftists.” At least not the standards the academies actually try to maintain when administering these institutions. There’s no evidence that SAT scores are lower, no evidence that high school GPA acceptance has gone down, and no slip in physical standards.

When the Supreme Court ruled last year that affirmative action policies allowing for college admission considerations based on race were unconstitutional, the Court allowed an exception for service academies because of their unique requirement for the military force to represent the broader population effectively. When that ruling was challenged last fall, an investigatory analysis found no instances where race was having a significant impact on admissions standards. So despite ample investigation, there was no proof that admissions boards were measurably lowering standards based on race or gender.

On top of the dubious nature of these claims about dropping standards, service academies are one of those experiences (like flight school, medical school, or Ranger School) that inherently handle the “standards question” by their very existence. The rot does not so easily set in. This is where people who haven’t attended might roll their eyes, but I can’t stress enough how much simply surviving the experience—relative to all other ways to spend your 18-to-22-year-old life—usually answers the question of whether you meet the standard to get your commission. You can’t take lower course loads. You can’t fall out of physical standards. You can’t skip the core requirements. And they don’t do grade inflation. It takes what it takes, more so than any other higher education experience on the planet.

If anyone is worried about dangerous “woke” thoughts splintering the mission, think about what these kids just grew up in. Think about the nonsense they’ve waded through online and the state of the messaging they’re getting in high schools today. Then marvel that they chose to embark on the ass-kicking of a lifetime just for the chance to serve the American people. And try to think better thoughts about them.

Of course, there are exceptions. Zero-defect is impossible. But that has always been true, DEI initiatives or not. What’s more telling than anything, with respect to the bluster over standards versus the intent of the policies, is where there is a clear and intentional lowering of standards that no one even tries to deny. I know it well because they did it for me: I was a recruited athlete.

If we broke down all the instances where someone looked the other way regarding significant competitive admissions gaps at a service academy, the overwhelming majority of them would be to fill the extremely competitive teams of academy athletics. The GPAs are lower. The SATs are lower. There are special categories to allow bodyweight standards to fall outside of regulation (we need an offensive line, after all). Coaches sometimes have to seek out members of Congress who haven’t filled their service academy nomination commitments yet because their athletes aren’t competitive on merits alone in a higher-population area. Which means we’re not really as concerned with the purity of standards as we might pretend, and we’re entirely comfortable with moving them for serious D1 recruits.

All of this is not only acceptable, it’s necessary—because a class of a thousand eggheads is not what makes a great officer corps. The question, then, if it’s pretty clear what all the fuss is not actually about (academic, physical, or character standards), is this: What is it really about?

For that, we have to go all the way back to the state of higher education in America and exactly what the administration promised voters about changing the culture of government bureaucracies and the military. It is reasonable for Americans to fear that the same crisis of trust diminishing American universities might—or already has—found its way into our service academies. That said, political gestures only take us off the path to useful policy and into a place where we can be convinced that the way out is to drive the culture back a few generations to avoid it. That one can look at the state of the world today—see the generational advancement in warfare technology, the erosion of NATO, and the growing global influence of China and North Korea—and still believe the first order of business is to do away with the Society of Black Engineers at West Point is…something.

Anyone who’s spent any time in and around a service academy knows that the kids who choose that path are bound by something not so easily corrupted. If you struggle to believe that a place can be both diverse, foster substantive discussions (which old grads like me might consider “woke”), and maintain high standards of excellence, then you might want to check in on your base beliefs about human beings. They don’t make service academy grads the way they used to—because the truth is they don’t make them at all, and they never have. The call that brought them there comes from within. But not everyone who answers it is standing on the same solid ground when they arrive. And if there are programs that help these kids grow and flourish to become the best they can be, it’s hard to see how that could be bad for them—or bad for America. These are the leaders of the future. Not the past. We owe more than burying their mission in shallow culture wars.