By usmaData
The Class of 2029 has started at West Point. And so kicks off admissions activities for the class of 2030.
Recently we noted that the Secretary of Defense issued a memorandum directing the Secretaries of the Military Departments to
“certify within 30 days that, for purposes of the 2026 MSA admissions cycle, as well as all subsequent admissions cycles, the MSA admissions offices will:
- Apply no consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex; and
- Offer admission based exclusively on merit”
How can we be sure this will happen?
Compliance Certification Is Not Trustworthy
What is certification? We assume it’s that the Secretaries of the branches write a letter saying that there will be compliance. If there’s more than that, please put it in comments.
Certification of this effort is admirable and helps clarify accountability at the individual level, but we think it is important for the institutions‘ credibility to be considerably more transparent about what is going on.
Unfortunately, simply saying “Yes we promise we’re complying” is no longer enough to earn public trust.
The root of the problem is that there is an entrenched progressive culture that is heavily biased towards non-compliant admissions practices.
Witness West Point’s legal battles to continue discriminatory admissions. Two, if not more, decades of admissions were completed under racially-biased practices. This went through administrations of both parties, through multiple Superintendents and Secretaries of Defense.
Scores of flag officers have signed on as advocates of race-based admissions. And it became part of “the way things are done,” until LTC Heffington cried Uncle and wrote a career-immolating letter to the public about how bad it had gotten.
If USMA embraced DEI-based admissions to begin with, and continued fighting merit-based admissions until the Secretary of War had to issue a memo specifically directing a merit-based approach, what makes us confident that it will follow the letter and spirit of the instruction, and then tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
Remember, this is a regime that has stymied access to data showing what was going on and mislead the public about the extent of the preferences.
Culture and ideologies are hard to change. We suppose this will be no different.
It is, in its own way, a progressive culture. There will be strong tendencies to subvert, dodge, undermine, or otherwise avoid compliance with SecWar’s direction.
USMA’s Measure of Merit Is The Whole Candidate Score
We take a short detour to point out that USMA’s measure of merit is the Whole Candidate Score. This score is a composite of academic, leadership, and athletic measures. It has a maximum of 8000 points with score weighting and specific opportunities as below (courtesy RAND’s 2015 paper; if there are updates, please comment and we’ll add them).
Note that for sports, exceptional talent is *already* given a high score in the Athletic WCS component. It is hard to see how much more exceptional someone would have to be to be allowed to break merit-based ordering.
Again, exceptional leadership talent is given points in recognition of ability.
RAND didn’t have a sub-component breakdown for the Academic score, so we refer to the folks at gainserviceacademyadmission.com for a breakdown of points allocation:
For all of these cases, we see that the WCS has a determined formula, and that exceptional talent within each respective area is given credit for achievement. Academics are heavily weighted, but athletics and leadership are rewarded.
So any “exception” to merit-based admissions would imply pure personal preference, disguised preferences, or an argument to change the WCS formula.
If West Point wishes to change the WCS calculation formula to be more oriented towards sports or non-academic credentials (like its sister academies do), that should be public record and clearly visible.
In any case we re-iterate that the WCS is the measure of merit, and its formula has been designed and determined by the Academy itself over decades.
USMA Ought To Publicly Demonstrate Compliance
Therefore, since any self-administered certifications of compliance are suspect, the Academy must show that it is following merit-based admissions practices, or exactly where the deviations are made, such as for athletes or other special experience. (We do not think Athletes should be granted special admissions preferences, but SecWar Hegseth did grant a concession for unique athletic talent and prior service.)
To this end, we propose that the USMA publicly share the following information for its 2026 and subsequent admissions cycles:
- Public database of anonymized candidate records, consisting of all candidates’ records for the admissions cycle, with the following fields per record:
- Male/Female field
- Self-identified race and ethnicity fields
- SAT and ACT scores
- High school GPA
- High school rank and class size
- Extracurricular achievements, including sport letters or distinguishing achievements
- Whether prior service
- CFA score
- Whole Candidate Scores by category and in total
- Whether exception to merit-based admissions
- Type of exception to merit-based admissions
- Nomination source
- Whether deemed qualified
- Whether extended an offer
- Whether accepted offer
- Whether showed up on R-day
(feel free to add any we may have overlooked in the comments!)
This is all ordinary data entry throughout admissions; nothing special or new is being captured. A dashboard could be built giving near-real-time updates to the public, and the underlying tables could be available for download.
Regarding the WCS: In addition to the candidate data, USMA should publish the WCS scoring rubric, including components, score allocations, and weights, used for each admissions cycle. This would enable clear mapping of the candidate application fields to admissions outcomes.
Transparency Would Enable Analysis And Verification
This dataset would enable independent observers to track the admissions cycle from first contacts through assessment, qualification, nomination, and offer cycles. It would show what pool of candidates were available to USMA, what their Whole-Candidate Score was, and what offer yields were.
Most importantly, it would enable public verification that merit-based practices were being followed and clearly identify exceptions.
Doing this would give difficult-to-manipulate evidence that USMA was choosing candidates by the best merit-based system it has, the Whole Candidate Score. The underlying data field availability would prevent any manual tampering with WCS scores. The process rubric would remove speculation about whether someone’s achievements justified their WCS score.
Such data would be easy to audit by people with the right access–“let me audit files of Candidate 1234 and 2573 to see that they match the data, and that the score mapping fit.” Special qualifications per SecWar’s exceptions could be noted as text fields, e.g. “Candidate is an athletic exception to WCS ranking.”
A second positive analysis would be showing what the Academy’s actual recruiting talent pool is. The public would be able to see, broadly, what type of talent the Academy is attracting in admissions cycles. This could be a powerful aid in driving additional recruiting efforts to improve the pool.
Last, since this could be done in near-real-time, it would enable visibility and timely accountability in a historically opaque process. It is no good to go through an admissions cycle, then think “hm, that still doesn’t look right,” then do an investigation, and then two years later find out that someone fudged WCS rankings or sent out letters of offer when they weren’t supposed to. Timely assessment and response is critical to verification and accountability.
Objections To This System
This would be radically transparent for any college admissions department. But West Point is not “any college.” It is a public college. In fact, it is more than public: it is the United States Military Academy. As such, the scrutiny should be higher than State U.
So what are reasons not to do this?
Competition: Perhaps other colleges may exploit something about West Point’s candidate profiles to bolster their own marketing or recruiting efforts. We don’t think this is a big enough risk to override the need for transparency in this important initiative.
Candidate privacy: Candidates may be worried that their application to West Point, and subsequent success (or not) or general status might become public knowledge. But as in public/private key cryptography, the candidate would know his or her unique set of application information; it would be very difficult for an outside party to know which data profile matched up to which real-life individual. Risk of outside disclosure of identity is very small.
Candidate Blowback: If a candidate is in the OML and is *not* selected for some reason, it may not be clear why the candidate was not selected. Perhaps that candidate makes a stink about it, pointing to their WCS score as an argument about why he should have been admitted over someone with a lower score. Maybe they want to sue, or go to some sort of appeals.
We think this to the point: We want a transparent, accountable, merit-based process. USMA uses WCS as its measure of merit. It should be quite clear in the dataset that WCS for merit-based admissions cut off at, for example, 950 people, with the next 100 having special exception codes for Athletics and Prior Service (or whatever the authorized categories are). Let the Academy justify making those exceptions outside of the scoring already allowed in the WCS rubric.
Operational Security: Perhaps sharing this data reveals some critical intelligence to various foreign competitors or powers. Hard to say what or how exactly, but malign foreign actors might find a way to use it.
West Point certainly thinks all its data is secret and shouldn’t be disclosed, but we think this was over-classification:
General Public Questions: Maybe West Point just doesn’t want to deal with people looking at its data and asking more questions. Well, what can we say. Good! There will be more questions. This comes with the territory of claiming a higher moral, social, and historical ground than other schools and institutions. On the other hand, this type of information availability would help candidates know their status and do their own planning during the admissions cycle, so questions could come down too!
There may be other objections. Admissions professionals may object to the reporting, or Academy administration may not like the spotlight and pressure. These can be considered but should not override the need to demonstrate compliance.
West Point Should Set The Standard
We’re almost there. The Secretary of War has directed merit-based admissions.
We think data and process transparency is the cleanest, quickest, easiest, most trustworthy approach for West Point (and USNA, and USAFA) to take. It is easy to audit. It is easy for the public to understand.
Just do it. Start in 2026. We’ll even help if asked.
As always, corrections and thoughtful criticism are welcome.
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