SFFA Sues West Point On Race-based Admissions Policies

News item hits the wires: The group behind the lawsuits that led the Supreme Court to gut affirmative action at higher education institutions sued the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday, seeking to end the school’s race-conscious admissions policies… The group asked a federal judge to prohibit West Point from considering or knowing … Read more

Students For Fair Admissions v … USMA, USNA, and USAFA?

It sounds like the military academies may get their chance to justify their race-based admissions practices. From Reuters: Aug 3 (Reuters) – The group that took its case against affirmative action in college admissions to the U.S. Supreme Court and won is seeking to end an exemption for military schools, the founder of Students for … Read more

Updates: Data Request, SFFA v Harvard, and the Academies

We’ve been quite busy and other things have taken priority on posting. However, there have been a few events worth noting: New Data Request We filed another FOIA request last year with the West Point office. It included requests for meaningful data for applicants and classes of 2020-2026, including, among some other helpful information, demographic, … Read more

Army Athletics Got A COVID Emergency Loan–Then Did Not Pay It Back

Back in January we wrote about the Army West Point Athletic Association’s (AWPAA) finances and business model. In this we noted that the AWPAA, while receiving massive government grants and other various subsidies and advantages of being at West Point, got a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan by July, 2020. The auditor reported that AWPAA … Read more

John T Reed Says Nice Things

We saw a while ago that John T Reed gave us a nice mention on his military articles blog. High Praise – Thanks John! I just learned of an important blog about my undergraduate alma mater West Point. It is called https://usmadata.com/..A more complete title might be.• The Unofficial Web Site of the United States Military … Read more

Resource Update – Center for Military Readiness

A reader sent us links to a recent Center for Military Readiness article “Army Scraps Gender-Neutral Standards Pushed by Discredited Social Engineers.” While our subject matter does not usually include the universe of topics related to the Army as a whole, we appreciate CMR’s similar theme that the Army’s focus should be on building a … Read more

Being Smart Hurts Your Army Career

Score one for the skeptics. In our previous posts we’ve used aptitude testing as a proxy for performance and the gold standard of what West Point recruiting efforts ought to be focused on. As it turns out, military scores matter more for “succeeding” in today’s Army. But is that a good thing? Our opinion is … Read more

Admissions Stats Updates

Late last year, and again in January, we requested additional information from the USMA admissions office. This was to update the site with admissions information for classes of 2021-23, and to understand graduation outcomes for the classes of ’19 and ’20. We went to the FOIA office email address used before, and then another address … Read more

Mailbag: Are we doing this right?

Recently we got a comment on our post on the most Black women ever to graduate USMA: Thank you for sharing your analysis. From one academic to another, I would recommend that you add a section discussing the strengths and weaknesses of your research method and design. There are a couple of weaknesses with your … Read more