Racial discrimination at Annapolis

Can the U.S. Navy afford to be biased against the best cadet applicants?

America has had, on the whole, pretty good admirals, such as these guys:

Sure, the three on the left won the Battle of Midway. (The fourth admiral, Willis Lee, won the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, turning back the Japanese invasion fleet by sinking the enemy battleship flagship in a one-on-one fight. He also won five gold medals in shooting at the 1920 Olympics. And he was a distant relative of Robert E. You-Know-Who.)

But, as you may notice, Spruance, Mitscher, Nimitz, and Lee were the Wrong Race and Gender. Therefore, something must be done.

Zach Goldberg has a fascinating study of racial preferences at the Naval Academy. Not surprisingly, Goldberg writes:

USNA [United States Naval Academy] simultaneously claims to have no insight into what the racial composition of its classes would look like absent the consideration of race. By its own admission, it has never conducted modeling to explore this question and offers no clear explanation for why such an analysis has not been undertaken. At the same time, USNA argues that eliminating racial considerations would cause minority enrollment to “drop dramatically,” a claim that stands in tension with its characterization of race as a minor and non-determinative factor in admissions. …

Of course, selecting Naval Academy cadets has been a highly political issue since 1857, when nominating candidates for the military academies was assigned to members of Congress.

Also, Annapolis likes to let in a few enlisted personnel, as well as kids of Navy people.

And the admirals love football. Navy plays Notre Dame every year. Annapolis usually loses because it insists upon four years of service before turning pro. (Navy Heisman winner Roger Staubach might be a worthy rival to Tom Brady for the greatest quarterback of all time if he didn’t spend age 22-26 in Da Nang.) So it no longer gets NFL prospects. Still, Navy has beaten N.D. four times going back to 2007.

Given these distributions, a race-blind admissions system that selected all applicants from the top four WPM [Whole Person Multiple] deciles would yield a markedly different racial composition among admitted students. Under such a system, the share of non-BCA [Blue Chip Athlete] /non-prep admits would shift to 71.4% white (compared to 61.3% in actuality), 14.3% Asian (16.7%), 8.5% Hispanic (11.8%), and just 1.9% Black (6.1%). If applied to the entire qualified applicant pool--meaning BCAs [Blue Chip Athletes] and prep applicants would no longer be virtual admission shoo-ins--whites would constitute 70.4% of admits (compared to 58.7% in actuality), Asians 13.8% (14.3%), Hispanics 9.3% (12.5%), and Blacks 2.7% (10.5%).

Can America tolerate 2.7% of Naval Academy graduates being black?

I’d say so, but others may have more extremist opinions than a moderate like myself.

Annapolis is one of the few prestigious colleges that are more discriminatory against whites than against Asians.

Paywall here.

Back in the early 1990s, African Americans performed impressively in the Gulf War vs. Iraq, with the #1 and #3 Army generals (Colin Powell and Calvin Waller) being black. When it emerged that 7% of Army generals were black, my reaction was, Wow, that’s great that African American talent specialized in the Army.

Everybody else’s reaction, however, seemed to be: If blacks can succeed that well in the Army, then the other three services should make sure they succeed equally well.

Ultimately, USNA would be unable to increase Black—and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic—representation to levels even approaching their share of the U.S. population if all applicants were held to the same standards as white applicants. There are simply too few Black applicants in the top deciles for race-neutral policies to achieve this outcome. Even with racial preferences, Black applicants remain underrepresented among admits.

This imbalance—along with the smaller proportion of Hispanic applicants in the top deciles relative to whites and Asians—may also explain why substantial racial preferences are extended to Asian applicants, despite their overrepresentation among admits relative to their share of the wider population. If USNA cannot achieve representational parity for each minority group individually, it can at least seek parity in the broader “non-white vs. white” sense--a metric it regularly tracks.

That’s presumably why the Naval Academy is biased toward Asians over whites, in contrast to Harvard.

Or, perhaps, the navy feels that having more Asian officers helps its mission in Asia?

… Professor Arcidiacono estimates that a white applicant with a modest 5% probability of admission would have a 50.3% chance of admission if treated as Black, a 14.8% chance if treated as Hispanic, an 18.3% chance if treated as Asian, and a 15.3% chance if treated as Native American/Hawaiian.

Notably, the admission ‘bonus’ for being treated as a black applicant increased from 40% in the 2023–2024 cycle to 59.4% in the 2025–2027 cycle. This latter period coincided, perhaps not coincidentally, with heightened public focus on racial equity following the killing of George Floyd. Turning to the right panel, a white applicant with a 25% chance of admission would see their probability rise to 85.7% if treated as Black, 51.3% if treated as Hispanic, and 59.1% if treated as Asian.

NAPS, the Naval Academy Preparatory School, is a common pathway into the Naval Academy for favored kids who aren’t academically ready for Annapolis, athletes not quite up to speed academically, enlisted sailors and Marines, and other categories. Pretty much everybody who gets into NAPS goes on to Annapolis a year later.

For example, a white applicant with a 5% chance of receiving a NAPS offer would see their probability rise to 37% if treated as Black during the 2023–2024 cycles—and to an astonishing 68% if treated as Black during the 2025–2026 cycles [the George Floyd Era]. Similarly, a white applicant with a 25% chance would see their odds rise to 79% during the 2023–2024 cycles and to 93% during the 2025–2026 cycles.

The British had a strong bias during the Napoleonic Wars toward only letting upper class types into Army officer ranks, while making the Royal Navy much more meritocratic because it was so technical.

Hence, the British had lots of famous admirals. For example, Captain Cook’s dad started life as a farm laborer, although he rose in social status. Lord Nelson was more aristocratic: “the first cousin of his maternal great-grandmother” was the nephew of prime minister Robert Walpole, an earl. It was assumed that naval officers were ill-situated to overthrow the government.

In contrast, British Army officers, especially cavalry officers, were drawn from the top 20,000 members of Society. Because they already more or less owned Britain, they were expected not to overthrow it. Hence, they tended to be pretty bad. The British were lucky that they had one great army general, the Duke of Wellington. But he was perpetually frustrated by how brave but stupid were his aristocratic cavalry commanders. Wellington complained:

Our officers of cavalry have acquired a trick of galloping at everything. They never consider the situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy, and never keep back or provide a reserve.

It would seem like the U.S. Navy in the 2020s needs smart officers.

But what do I know about the miraculous value of diversity?