This Naval Academy Professor thinks so,

With the rise after World War II of the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at universities around the country, the academies now produce 20 percent or less of the officers in each service, at an average cost to taxpayers of nearly half a million dollars per student, more than four times what an R.O.T.C.-trained officer costs.

The institutions are set on doing things their own way, yet I know of nobody in the Navy or other services who would argue that graduates of Annapolis or West Point are, as a group, better than those who become officers through other programs. A student can go to a civilian school like Vanderbilt, major in art history (which we don’t offer), have the usual college social experience and nightlife (which we forbid), be commissioned through R.O.T.C. — and apparently be just as good an officer as a Naval Academy product.

Instead of better officers, the academies produce burned-out midshipmen and cadets. They come to us thinking they’ve entered a military Camelot, and find a maze of petty rules with no visible future application. These rules are applied inconsistently by the administration, and tend to change when a new superintendent is appointed every few years. The students quickly see through assurances that “people die if you do X” (like, “leave mold on your shower curtain,” a favorite claim of one recent administrator). We’re a military Disneyland, beloved by tourists but disillusioning to the young people who came hoping to make a difference.

Read the full Op-Ed here.

As a graduate of a service Academy I sympathize with the professor, it seems that not only do service academies produce burnt-out cadets, but often professors as well.

However, the problems he describes are not new ones, they’ve been happening at all the institutions for years now and debated thoroughly among cadets, midshipmen and faculty.

In fact, I’ve often wondered if many of these issues haven’t always existed in some form, inherent in the design of the system itself, but soon forgotten by former grads who are quick to assure you that “things were different when I went through…back when it was hard.”

In a somewhat paradoxical twist, elite academic institutions by their nature are often prone to the very thing they preach so adamantly against – mediocrity.

Here’s William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor writing in 2008,

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Now, there are plenty of differences between Yale and the Naval Academy, but I draw the parallel simply to point out that the “march toward mediocrity” is not something unique to the service academies.

Where people are likely to get agitated is that, unlike other schools, the taxpayer is paying for the education of cadets and midshipmen. Like any good stockholder they should always be asking, “where’s the value?” Why spend half a million per cadet if they’re no better at the end of it then an ROTC or OTS grad?

At this point I’m not sure that I have much of an answer. I’m glad that I went to USAFA for many reasons and certainly feel that I received a top-notch education, however can I say that I’m better than I would have been had I gone a different route? Who knows the answers to questions like that? Not me.

So my friends, many of you reading this were classmates of mine at USAFA, what do you think? Did going to the Academy make you a better officer than if you had gone to a school like Vanderbilt?