Athletics Exception To Merit-Based Admissions Should Be Removed

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stipulated an athletics admissions exception for West Point and other Service Academies. In directing merit-based admissions, he wrote that merit-based scores may “give weight” to “unique athletic talent.”

This is bad and the language should be rescinded. DEI advocates and/or athletics stakeholders will exploit this particular call-out as an exception to merit-based admissions for talented individuals and use it in ways contrary to a merit-based approach. Therefore, we strongly advise that the Secretary of War remove the athletic exception (“weight to unique athletic talent”) in admissions.

The Problem With Athletic Exceptions In Admissions

The hierarchy of values implicit in this exception is that 1) DEI/racially-biased admissions is bad, 2) merit is better, but 3) intercollegiate athletics are best and must be accommodated. This is clearly contrary to the point of the memo and the purpose of the US Military Academy at West Point.

Athletic exceptions to merit are themselves a major drag on the quality of the Corps of Cadets and pry open the door to racially-biased admissions under the guise of athletics.

Why? The Academies will use it as a loophole to evade both points 1 and 2 of the merit-based admissions guidance. It will allow consideration of race and non-merit-based measures in admissions. This means that even a “consideration: of “unique talent” is contrary to merit-based admissions.

Someone will have to decide what “unique athletic talent” actually is and how to identify it (or who gets to). This is not a straightforward problem. Then, how many exceptions can Admissions (or Athletics) make? What are the checks and balances on the decision? This is a lot of leeway in the decision process of an organization that has resisted, at every turn, pushes for transparency and merit. We should also keep in mind that coaches and athletic staff are incentivized to optimize their teams, not the Corps of Cadets and resulting officer quality.

Further, there is overlap in how an admissions regime might accomplish racial-composition and football-team-composition goals. For example, a Black football player might “check two boxes” for admissions, but be admitted under an “athletic talent” exception. This makes it difficult to distinguish between motivations for admissions decisions and therefore is an exception exploitable by DEI advocates.

Regardless of the exact mechanism, it results in a less-qualified Corps, and by extension less-qualified officers.

Here’s the evidence.

Athletic Exceptions and Whole Candidate Scores

From our Whole Candidate Score (WCS) analysis, we have actual data on the composition of classes by WCS. We know which members of the class were athletes, of which sport, and what their WCS scores were.

The WCS is the holistic, single-point scoring of an applicant candidate’s Academic, Athletic, and Leadership achievements. This means that USMA believes it is the strongest predictor of success and best diagnostic measure of the type of candidate.

West Point USMA uses WCS as the candidate merit ranking score. The maximum score is 8000. The score takes into account standardized test scores, high school class ranking, athletic achievement, and extracurricular activities. The US Naval Academy at Annapolis and US Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs have functionally equivalent measures.

To emphasize: WCS already includes scoring tiers for “unique athletic” talent and athletic achievement at several levels:

So to grant further latitude to admissions to make allowances for “unique athletic talent” is redundant to already-existing scoring mechanics. Even if there were an Olympic medal-winner in a sport, say, track and field, then that person would get the 800 WCS points as an “outstanding athlete.”

Since outstanding talent is already given points on USMA’s own scale, it’s not clear why even an Olympic medal winner would justify an exception to this scheme.

Athletics and Whole Candidates Scores

We can clearly see from cadet WCS profiles that athletic special exceptions act against the intent of the memo. We expected this from our earlier post on Athlete SATs; this set of data confirms that trend.

The profile of WCS looks like this after separating out those cadets who were intercollegiate athletes ( called “Corps-Squad,” abbreviated “CS,” and managed by the Army West Point Athletic Association). Dataset is class of 2015-2019, and WCS identified as described in this post.

We see several things:

1. Non-corps-squad median WCS is 6365.
2. All-Corps-squad median WCS is 5958, or slightly below the 25th percentile of the non-corps-squad group.
3. Football is a special case. The median football player WCS is 5615, with the median Black football player score at 5459, or below the 25th percentile of all CS athletes.
4. Black athletes make up disproportionate amounts of athletes– 48% of overall Black cadets in CS, 15% in football vs overall peer groups of 39% and 5% respectively– and have the lowest WCS scores.
5. There are Black cadets are competitive at WCS levels, which we can see at the 75th percentiles ranges and higher. USMA should clearly admit them in a merit-ordered admissions scheme.

We can see what the WCS ranges without athletic exceptions would look like by looking at the “Non-CS” categories. The difference tops out at 400 points of WCS between non-CS and CS cadets. So eliminating athletic exceptions would have a benefit ceiling of 400 WCS points to the CS-group, and could raise the overall group WCS score from 6242 to 6365, or 123 points.

The overall benefit may be somewhat less depending on what types of recruiting exceptions non-football sports get. But the gist is that the benefit is real and significant.

So we keep in mind that the WCS represents a holistic assessment of candidate capability. 400 points in the CS group is roughly enough to move from the 25th percentile to the median score. Should we disregard that type of performance increase just so that coaches can get exceptions for their teams?

Granting exceptions to WCS ranking for “unique athletic talent” will effectively subvert the purpose of the merit guidance. It will mean admitting cadets to play football who are scoring at the rock (heh)-bottom of the WCS ranges. Athletic exceptions and preferences act to admit low-performing cadets as measured by West Point’s comprehensive metric.

The only way around this is to reject the athletic exception pathway.

Impacts on Class Composition

Even apart from impacting major recruited athletics programs (i.e. football), the composition of the classes will change under a merit-based admissions program.

Since the CS overall score is ~25th percentile of non-CS cadets, and Corps Squad athletes represent 38% of the overall population, we’d expect the percentage of recruited athletes in the Corps of Cadets to drop to 25% or lower of the class.

Football is a special case. It is what most people think of when they think “Corps Squad.” It is the most prominent sport at West Point, and the most likely to be seeking and obtaining admissions exceptions. It would also be the most impacted by merit-based admissions.

The Football team’s median WCS is 5615, or below the 25th percentile of the Corps of Cadets; indeed, a truly merit-based, rank-ordered admissions scheme would probably disable West Point from fielding an NCAA Division 1 football team. Maybe 25% of the football team would be competitive for admissions on a WCS basis.

This becomes a values question: Does West Point uphold its admissions standards or disregard them for football?

Other sports would be impacted less, though perhaps some would be weakened.

From a racial-goals and class-composition point of view, we see that Blacks make up 9% of non-Corps-Squad cadets under a regime which included racial preferences in admissions. If West Point uses a strictly merit-based admissions program, then we projected that we’d see the class composition of Blacks drop from ~11-14% of a class to 3-5%, with slight increases in Asian, White, and Male composition.

This might be unwelcome to those seeking nominal “equality” or “representation” in the ranks. But those cadetships would be earned, fully merit-based, fully capable, and able to perform. Right now, USMA effectively admits a number of cadets only to play football or other Div 1 sports, the value of which to West Point is questionable.

How To Tell What West Point Does

The deadline for applications to the class of 2030 is January 31, 2026. West Point is in the “home stretch” of getting applicants in and beginning final evaluations. It has an opportunity to abide by the spirit of the guidance and adopt a merit-first approach.

We encourage an “open-kimono” approach to admissions. We’ve advocated for transparent verification of admissions practices, to see where USMA applies merit and where the exceptions are. For any exceptions, we’d hope the admissions and athletics staff at West Point would be confident in their decisions and willing to share the individual outcomes and rationale so that the public and Secretary of War can make informed judgments.

If SecWar Hegseth retains the athletic exception, then we estimate we’ll see 7-10% Black composition of classes. But if West Point uses a merit-based system, we’d estimate seeing a class with 3-5% Black composition.

Let’s see how USMA does. We look forward to seeing the Class of 2030 profile and how it turns out.

Update:

Commenter EK below points out that WCS is not perfect and in fact has significant shortcomings in athletic scoring (and maybe other areas too). We agree. We used it as the measure of merit since it’s USMA’s own metric. But in some cases USMA may need to revise it. We also think that the right way to address shortcomings is to update the WCS rubric so that it is transparent and publicly accessible, and not to grant individual-discretion exceptions.