Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 48

can't elite civilian colleges and universities do the same? In
USMAPS, West Point is making the investment necessary to
help highly capable but underprepared Black and Hispanic students
succeed. Ivy League schools, by contrast, have taken the
easier path. Rather than tap their immense endowments and
powerful fund-raising capacities to train up large numbers of
talented lower-income students of color, they hit their race
targets by lowering the bar for admissions or enrolling betterprepared
minority students from affluent families. Just 3 percent
of all students at Harvard come from the bottom 20 percent
by income, as Richard Kahlenberg noted in the Washington
Monthly, and almost three-quarters of Black students are
from the top socioeconomic fifth of the Black population.
The prep school model of race-based admissions is not the
easy target for conservative activists that Harvard's more conventional
version proved to be. If affirmative action has a future
after SFFA v. Harvard, introducing programs like USMAPS
at civilian colleges could be what saves it.
T
he origins of military prep school can be traced to 1916,
when an act of Congress authorized enlisted men to
apply to West Point, spawning informal academic programs
for soldiers stationed at home and abroad to prepare for
the academy. USMAPS was born when West Point consolidated
these programs into a formal preparatory school for enlisted
soldiers in 1946.
After 1948, when President Harry Truman banned segregation
in the military, Black service members received few
opportunities for promotion to the officer corps. By the late
1960s, frustration over this pattern of discrimination, made
worse by large numbers of Black draftees serving under white
officers in the brutal combat of Vietnam, led to racial tension
and violence. Recruiting more Black officers became imperative
for maintaining order, and in the 1970s and '80s, military
leaders responded with aggressive affirmative action plans.
That included establishing Reserve Officer Training Corps
(ROTC) programs at historically Black colleges and universities
and requiring minority representation on officer promotion
boards. The military also leaned heavily on USMAPS and
similar prep schools in the Navy and Air Force to bring more
Black candidates up to the academic level of the service academies.
As a result, the Black student populations grew substantially.
By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, a Black four-star general,
Colin Powell, was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
the military was widely lauded as the most successfully integrated
institution in the country.
That success presented a major problem for conservatives
in their long war to outlaw affirmative action. In 2003, the Supreme
Court took up a case, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the
University of Michigan Law School, that most experts predicted
would spell the end to race-conscious admissions policies.
Instead, a group of retired senior military leaders delivered an
amicus brief testifying to the vital role affirmative action had
played in the rebuilding of the nation's armed forces after Vietnam
and warning of dire consequences to military readiness
48 September/October 2023
should those tools be taken away. Legal experts called the brief
a " showstopper, " and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing
for the majority, drew heavily from it in an opinion that would
protect affirmative action for another two decades.
Meanwhile, in 2011, USMAPS relocated from Eatontown,
New Jersey, to a single enormous glass building just a few miles
up the road from the academy's main campus on the Hudson
River. There, promising West Point applicants whose grades
and test scores fall short of the academy live and study for 10
months without distractions. " USMAPS is a very close facsimile
of what they'll experience at West Point, " Colonel Carl
Wojtaszek, the chair of the West Point economics department
and coauthor of a major recent study of USMAPS, told me. In
addition to underrepresented racial groups, USMAPS serves
prior-enlisted service members, who make up 20 to 30 percent
of the USMAPS student body, and student athletes recruited
to West Point, who make up about 40 percent. " Prepsters " are
put through a gauntlet of military drills and physical training,
but the school's main emphasis is academics. The curriculum
focuses on three core subjects-math, science, and English-
and features a full-year study skills course that emphasizes
time management and information literacy. " Learning how to
just prioritize and time-manage-that was the biggest key at
Prep that they would stress to us, " says Jemel Jones, who attended
USMAPS in 2018 and graduated from West Point this
spring after playing quarterback all four seasons at the academy.
Jones says those study skills helped him keep pace with
students who were admitted directly to West Point when he arrived
at the academy.
Civilian colleges across the country have also long struggled
with the fact that first-year students from disadvantaged
backgrounds often lack the academic preparation they need to
succeed. Their efforts to correct the problem, however, have
been much less effective. Most colleges funnel underprepared
new students into remedial education courses that rehash material
the students failed to learn in high school. Students who
are put in remedial classes at four-year colleges are often overburdened
by the extra class time and schoolwork, and are more
likely to drop out, according to the organization Education Reform
Now. More than half of Black students at four-year colleges
are in such programs.
Many colleges, including highly selective ones, have taken
a more promising approach: placing incoming freshmen with
lower grades and test scores in two- to six-week summer preparatory
programs. The few studies of these programs' effect
on student attainment suggest that they are modestly more
successful than regular remedial classes. For instance, a 2010
study of 2,222 incoming freshmen at a selective technical college
found that students who attended the college's summer
bridge program were 3 percent more likely to graduate than a
control group of students with similar high school GPAs and
household income.
But for students who grew up in the most adverse circumstances
and attended low-performing high schools,
only so much can be accomplished in just a few weeks. No
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

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