{"id":14641,"date":"2011-12-13T01:30:32","date_gmt":"2011-12-13T04:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=14641"},"modified":"2011-12-12T23:35:14","modified_gmt":"2011-12-13T02:35:14","slug":"usna-professor-criticizes-applicant-stats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/13\/usna-professor-criticizes-applicant-stats\/","title":{"rendered":"USNA Professor Criticizes Applicant Stats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The US Naval Academy recently publicized its pace to set a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marinecorpstimes.com\/news\/2011\/12\/navy-academy-stiff-competition-class-of-2016-120511w\/\">record for the number of applicants<\/a>.\u00a0 The US military academies have a notoriously low acceptance rate, an indicator of the competitive nature of selection.<\/p>\n<p><em>Au contraire<\/em>, says Annapolis English professor Bruce Fleming.<\/p>\n<p>Fleming, a fairly <a href=\"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/18\/naval-academy-professor-settles-complaint\/\">&#8220;frequent critic&#8221; of his employer<\/a>, filed a FOIA to determine how the Naval Academy counts applicants.\u00a0 He says the Academy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.navytimes.com\/news\/2011\/12\/navy-professsor-says-academy-overstates-applicants-121011w\/\">overstates and artificially inflates<\/a>\u00a0the number of people who actually try to get into Annapolis.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The academy counts as \u201capplicants\u201d people who have not completed an application but have shown an interest <!--more-->through other means&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>An academy admissions official Dec. 5 used this standard to boast that the school had 18,651 applicants so far this year, saying it put the school on track for a record year for the Class of 2016&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The Class of 2015, which began training during the summer, had 5,720 completed applications; the academy cited its applicant number as 19,145 \u2014 more than three times the number of completed applications.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Academy documents indicate they made 1,426 offers of appointment, for a 24.9% acceptance rate for the class of 2015 &#8212; quite a bit higher than the 7.4% acceptance rate publicized.<\/p>\n<p>Does that lower the prestige of attending the military academies?\u00a0 Not really, since the applicants who self-select to apply are already culled due to highly restrictive standards (and <em>perceived <\/em>standards) of both admission and commission.<\/p>\n<p>Still, it is not an insignificant detail to tell a high school graduate he has a 1 in 4 chance of being accepted, as opposed to 1 in 14, if he simply completes his application.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The US Naval Academy recently publicized its pace to set a record for the number of applicants.\u00a0 The US military academies have a notoriously low acceptance rate, an indicator of the competitive nature of selection. Au contraire, says Annapolis English professor Bruce Fleming. Fleming, a fairly &#8220;frequent critic&#8221; of his employer, filed a FOIA to determine how the Naval Academy [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[133,2575,534,2,473],"class_list":["post-14641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-military-academies","tag-annapolis","tag-applicants","tag-bruce-fleming","tag-military","tag-usna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14641"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14641\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}