With the Class of 2030’s R-Day today (June 29th, 2026), West Point now knows perfectly who was an applicant, who received, offers, who received nominations, who accepted offers, and who showed up.
Therefore it is now perfectly positioned to share the data demonstrating that it has met Secretary of War Hegseth’s direction to use merit-based admissions.
We detailed how USMA can do this in an earlier post: West Point Should Demonstrate Merit-Based Admissions. We suggested specifically that it share this information:
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
It is critical for maintaining trust in the institution that this information be shared with the public, and soon.
It must be shared at the detailed level we describe. Why? It’s easy to hide exceptions in aggregated stats. Such exceptions were hidden for years, decades, to the point where people who are knowledgeable about USMA admissions are shocked at the degree to which merit (as defined by West Point with its WCS calculation) was ignored.
We hope that Sec. Hegseth is not misled by summary statistics purporting to show that he got what he wanted.
In particular, any “weight” applied to “unique athletic talent” should be specifically scrutinized, since that is a known failure point of the prior DEI-and-athletics admissions regime.
All right, West Point. You can do the right thing and put the cards on the table. Show that admissions are being run the way they’re intended, the way your soldiers and citizens deserve.
Not holding my breath for full USMA Admissions disclosure or transparency. Folks in admissions are hundreds of miles from DC and have been less-than-open about the true going-ons for years.