daftandbarmy
Army.ca Dinosaur
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Spectrum said:
It's hard to disagree with this article IMHO. Degree granting Military colleges are a 'colonial anachronism', pretty much:
Let’s abolish West Point: Military academies serve no one, squander millions of tax dollars
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/05/lets_abolish_west_point_military_academies_serve_no_one_squander_millions_of_tax_dollars/
Many pundits have suggested that the Republicans’ midterm gains were fueled by discontent not merely with the president or with the (improving) state of the economy, but with government in general and the need to fund its programs with taxes. Indeed, the Republican Party of recent decades, inspired by Ronald Reagan’s exhortation to “starve the [government] beast,” has been anti-tax and anti-government. Government programs, as many of their thinkers note, primarily exist to perpetuate their own existence. At the very least, they have to justify that existence.
In the spirit of hands across the aisle, I’d like to suggest that the first thing the new Republican majority devote itself to is not, say, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but to converting the four hugely expensive and underproductive U.S. service academies (Navy, Army, Air Force and Coast Guard) — taxpayer-funded undergraduate institutions whose products all become officers in the military — to more modest and functional schools for short-term military training programs, as the British have repurposed Sandhurst.
Training is something the military does—education, certainly, is not. Indeed, undergraduate education of officers has already largely been outsourced, since most new officers come from the much cheaper Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at civilian universities (at one-quarter the cost of the academies), or from the several months of Officer Training Corps (one-eighth the cost) that follows either an enlisted career, or college. By all standards, these officers are just as good as those who come from the service academies, which now produce under 20 percent of U.S. officers.
The service academies once had a purpose: when they were founded in the 19th century (the Air Force split off from Army after World War II), college was classics and religion for gentlemen, so it made sense to have technical training institutes for people who would be in charge of increasingly technical warfare. All the service academies have now to justify their cost and their pretensions, it seems, is their once-illustrious history, and the club of “tradition,” which they wield mercilessly against students who dare question why things are as they are.
Who benefits from these strange historical holdovers? Not the taxpayers who fund them. The service academies are the vanity projects of the brass who went there. Their interest is in looking good (it’s good for their careers) and in keeping the tax dollars flowing. All official information taxpayers get about the service academies comes from the brass who run them and who use them as their private country clubs — at taxpayer expense. Military subordinates (which includes the students) are legally unable to offer conflicting views. The result is that the service academies are feel-good hype factories that operate with virtually no accountability and little oversight, the very definition of government bloat on autopilot.
Oh, yes—there’s one more group of people who defend these places to the death: the parents of the young military members who attend them. Why wouldn’t they? Having their children admitted is a government-sponsored guarantee of a golden ticket to life: college at taxpayer expense with no student debts, the highest salary of any set of graduates, and guaranteed employment and (no-Obamacare-necessary) health benefits for at least five years, frequently well beyond. And no, most people in the military aren’t remotely likely to be shot at.
The service academies are poster boys of the out-of-control entitlement programs Republicans say they hate. So I say to the new Republican Senate majority and the strengthened House majority: Welcome to Washington, and get to work.
Yet they are alluring, and seem on the surface to offer a better alternative to other colleges that gave in long ago to the idea of keeping students happy with as few requirements as possible. By contrast, the mission statement for the Naval Academy, whose graduates cost taxpayers about half a million dollars each and who become officers in the Navy and Marine Corps — and where I am in my 28th year as a professor — makes for stirring reading. So too do the mission statements of the other service academies, all government programs with one purpose only, to graduate military officers: West Point for Army, Colorado Springs for the Air Force, and New London for the Coast Guard. Navy’s mission statement speaks—in contrast to almost all other colleges in the U.S.– of purpose. The mission of the Naval Academy is “to develop midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty,” How inspiring these ideals are!
There’s one problem. Nobody ever asks if we achieve these goals. I know after 28 years that we don’t.
The service academies in the new millennium are little more than military Disneylands for tourists. They are also cash cows for the brass who send their own children there at taxpayer expense: the children of multiple current and past administrators have gotten this taxpayer-supported present, which looks to me like (illegal) nepotism. And far from “imbu[ing] them with the highest ideals,” the service academies are in fact the graveyards of the ideals of students who come looking for something that transcends the watery values of secular humanism that are the best many other institutions can offer.
Conservatives bash welfare and food stamps, but in fact the service academies are the most generous government giveaway going. But just try, as I did, finding out who gives away the benefits or even on what basis. That’s information the taxpayers can’t know. Three rounds of FOIA requests to see who admits and why have hit the brick wall of the brass refusing to answer. The military prides itself on accountability, but the admissions office of Navy wants to give away the taxpayers’ money with no accountability whatsoever. Why did a football player get in, while the high-flyer woman who led her class was rejected? They informed me it was because admitted candidates showed “leadership.” What’s that? How was this measured? (We don’t even require an interview to gauge charisma, which the vast majority of our students lack.) The message from the brass is clear:funnel the money to us and don’t ask questions.
Ever tried to debate with one of the beneficiaries of this taxpayer-supported largesse? I have, on NPR, when I was informed by a proud and defiant recipient of this government give-away that the service academies were a “national treasure”—not, coincidentally, one that enriched him personally. Service academy officers aren’t better—but almost invariably, they’re convinced they are: the administrators assure midshipmen repeatedly that they are “the best and the brightest” and are “held to a higher standard.” So it’s not coincidence that service academy officers have a negative reputation in the military as smug ring-knockers. They didn’t have to work their way through college..
And they’re hardly, on average, the “best and the brightest.” In fact more than a quarter of the class has SAT scores below 600, and our average is lower than the nearby state school University of Maryland. Twenty percent of our class comes through a taxpayer-supported remedial 13th grade (another almost $50,000 per student for taxpayers). They fill our remedial courses (I am teaching some of these this semester, as a full professor)—a second try at getting them up to college level. The top 10 percent are impressive. But they are the exceptions rather than the rule, and almost all (I know from talking to them) are deeply disillusioned by the Academy and by what they found there.
But we’re ferociously selective, right? The Naval Academy has highly creative definitions of what constitutes an applicant, and applying these makes us more selective, on paper, than all but a handful of U.S. schools—and boosts our beauty quotient in the so-important U.S. News and World Report rankings. In fact we count all 7,500 applicants to a week-long summer program for 11th graders, that enrolls 2,500, as Naval Academy applicants, as well as anybody who fills out enough information to create a candidate number. It was just last year we stopped counting the 3,000 applicants to ROTC programs at civilian schools as Naval Academy applicants (say what?) when a reporter discovered it, but when I was on the admissions board for a year a decade ago we considered nothing close to the 20,000 applicants they claim. It was actually fewer than 5,000 candidates for 1,800 admits. Is this an outright lie to scam taxpayers, or simple unfamiliarity with the legal requirements of the Department of Education as to what constitutes an “applicant”?
