Glamour of America’s Military Schools Fading for Youth

The U.S. Naval Academy has always held a special attraction for Doug Griffin: He has been fascinated since childhood by military history books and grainy newsreel footage of World War II naval battles. And three of his relatives received their officer training here.

Yet, when 16-year-old Griffin recently toured the academy’s immaculate grounds and learned more about what life would be like as a midshipman, a wave of misgivings hit him like a tumble in a cold sea.

“It just seems so different from what my life’s been like,” said Griffin, who visited Annapolis during a driving trip with his parents from their home in Chicago. “The rules, the discipline--it’s a whole different world. I don’t know if I’d fit in or not.”

The Naval Academy, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., always have been able to rely on the masculine appeal associated with their names to attract top new talent. Over the years, they have turned out many of the nation’s warrior elite, along with a fair number of national sports heroes. Statesmen still flock to their historic campuses to deliver important speeches and demonstrate their rapport with the military.

But these days, the academies see increasing evidence that the old glamour no longer registers the same way with young people, who too often are not aware of the grand traditions or, like Griffin, find military life too alien from the unbuttoned freedoms they have known. Concerned that the future supply of top candidates may be in jeopardy, academy officials are reaching out more aggressively to young candidates and stepping up self-promotion campaigns.

Fewer Top Candidates Applying to Academies

The academies still attract a substantial crop of top students, and their brand of patriotic service and self-denial still appeals to many young people. Yet the volume of applicants--a key indicator of student interest--has fallen since the end of the Cold War by more than 50% at the Naval Academy and Air Force Academy. Applications to West Point essentially are flat, but officials there acknowledge that they must hustle harder to line up top applicants.

And these trends are occurring at a time when applications logically should be increasing: The population of college-age teens is swelling, and a growing share of them now expect to go to college.

While the waning popularity of the academies has not reached crisis proportions, military officials say it is one more worrisome sign that years of relative peace and a continuing economic expansion are threatening to drain away talent badly needed by the increasingly technical military services. The academies’ concerns about maintaining quality come as the armed forces are struggling to attract and keep good recruits across the board.

There is “no comparison” between the level of awareness young people had of the academies during the Cold War era and the level that exists today, said Col. Michael Jones, West Point’s admissions director. “It’s a huge problem for us.”

David A. Vetter, dean of admissions at the Naval Academy, noted: “No longer can we assume that we’re going to have many thousands of talented applicants fall in our laps and we can skim the best. . . . We’ve got to tell our story.”

The three academies turn out nearly 20% of the military’s officers. The rest are trained in Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at other colleges and universities or in the full-time officer candidate schools run by the military services.

Students at the academies pay no tuition, but they must agree to serve at least five years on active duty after they graduate.

A 1967 Naval Academy graduate, Vetter recalled that, when he was young and memories of World War II and the Korean War were fresher, the contribution of the academies to the national defense was widely understood. In the late 1950s, television networks even produced two uplifting series based on the academies: “Men of Annapolis” and “The West Point Story.” The latter featured guest appearances by Clint Eastwood, Leonard Nimoy and Barbara Eden.

Now, it seems, many high school students are not sure what goes on at the academies. (Indeed, many young people do not seem to have clearly focused on what goes on in wartime. When the bloody World War II film “Saving Private Ryan” was released in 1998, the West Point admissions office got calls from young people who declared that they no longer wished to be considered as candidates.)

Seeking admission to one of the military academies has always been more complicated than applying to a state university. For one thing, applicants must obtain an “official” nomination, typically from a member of Congress. They also may be nominated by the president or vice president, by high school Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs or by a college ROTC program. Some nominations are reserved for enlisted service members, children of deceased or disabled veterans and children of service members who received the Medal of Honor.

But there are a number of reasons why applying for admission has become even less appealing to today’s young people.

Military’s Mission Seems Less Urgent

The military’s mission has seemed less urgent after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the fact that the military has shrunk by a third since the late 1980s may have caused some potential applicants to question the career prospects of young military officers.

“Maybe they wonder, ‘Is this a secure future for me? Is this still relevant?’ ” Vetter said.

Congress has made it substantially easier to get college loans and scholarships in recent years, a change that has diminished, for some, the appeal of the free education offered by the academies.

And for many young people, the discipline and restrictions of military life are exactly what they do not want during their college years.

In addition to looking for colleges that offer good academic programs and career preparation, many young people are thinking that they “want a good time,” said Tyler McDonald, 17, a prospective Naval Academy student in Annapolis.

“This,” he added, referring to the academy, “is the antithesis of what they want.”

The academies’ regimen is physically and mentally demanding, and there are restrictions on liberty that are unthinkable almost anywhere else.

At the Naval Academy, midshipmen juggle heavy loads of classwork, sports, military training and extracurricular activities on rigid schedules. They stand watch, march to meals in uniform and keep their rooms ready for inspection at all times. Alcohol is prohibited and sex is forbidden. (Female midshipmen make up about 16% of the school’s 4,000 students.)

Upperclassmen are charged with seeing that younger students meet standards of behavior and dress and can give out demerits and inflict psychological stress, especially on first-year students, who are called plebes.

Elizabeth Morrison, 16, of Annapolis, got a taste of these stresses this summer when she attended a six-day seminar for prospective students.

On the last evening, called “indoctrination night,” midshipman instructors badgered the students to do various simple tasks--such as sitting on the outermost 3 inches of a chair--again and again, until they did them properly. They demanded that the high school students recite lists of meaningless facts, as plebes long have been commanded to do.

“I thought, ‘I’m not sure I like all this yelling--maybe I should think about another place to go to college,’ ” said Morrison, whose mother is a Navy medical administrator at the academy. After it was over, however, she said that she felt a “sense of accomplishment.”

Morrison, who also is considering the University of Virginia and a small Christian college, said that the academy has first-rate facilities and a beautiful campus and that it offers an opportunity to get into the Navy’s most sought-after specialties. But its stresses make it “probably the hardest way to go to college,” she said.

Lawrence Heyworth, 16, of Annapolis, said he is eager to apply to the academy but acknowledged that many of his friends “don’t think they have it in them to do this. . . . They can’t understand why I’d want to.”

Despite such reservations, academy life actually has lost some of the fabled harshness that older alumni love to recall.

Hazing involving physical abuse is prohibited. At the Naval Academy, upper-class midshipmen are no longer entitled to give plebes brutal spankings with sawed-off brooms, as happened to the father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the late 1920s. “It jolted your backside right through the top of your head,” McCain quoted an alumnus as recalling in his 1999 book, “Faith of My Fathers.”

Academy officials have eased up in several other ways that affect recruitment.

The Naval Academy traditionally tried to get the most for the $250,000 it spends on each student’s education by discouraging those who might not want a full 20-year military career. Now, officials here talk up the contributions to society of academy graduates, such as former President Carter and billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who did not make a career of the Navy.

“Our message is, this is a place that prepares you for success in life, for whatever you do,” Vetter said.

The academies also have eased up on efforts to weed out early those who do not measure up. The old theory was that, if midshipmen could not stand up to the school’s discipline, they would not make good leaders in combat.

Now the academy will try to save promising candidates who encounter problems at the outset. Officials said they recognize that shy and introverted midshipmen can make real contributions as officers in many of the highly technical Navy specialties.

This new emphasis is one reason the attrition rate has dropped. About one-fifth of midshipmen now leave voluntarily or are kicked out by the end of the four-year program. Traditionally, the rate has been about one-third.

Database Lists Used for Recruiting

Meanwhile, military academy officials have taken a number of steps to increase the flow of top applicants. Naval Academy officials, for example, have begun buying database lists that allow them to track potential candidates, starting as early as seventh grade.

The Air Force Academy has stepped up its use of the Internet. And West Point last year launched a public relations campaign to raise awareness among potential cadets.

Academy officials say that, while long-term trends are clearly cause for concern, the institutions have been periodically challenged in their long histories.

All three saw recruiting slump during the Vietnam War. And during the early 1990s, amid the military’s severe contraction after the Cold War, there was talk that the academies were not worth the roughly $1 billion a year the government was spending on them.

As long ago as the 1830s, powerful members of Congress agitated to shut down West Point, which they saw as an insular preserve for the ill-behaved sons of the elite. Ulysses S. Grant, an unhappy cadet at the time, wrote in his autobiography that he followed the controversy avidly in the newspapers, hoping the academy would be closed--leaving him free to return home.

Some educators said that interest in the academies may be depressed from time to time by periodic scandals concerning such things as cheating, theft, drugs and sexual misconduct. The Naval Academy now is trying to cope with bad publicity over charges that two of the school’s football players raped a female midshipman at an off-campus party in June.

Such scandals “definitely” affect interest, said Bill Hall, president of Applied Policy Research Inc., an admissions consulting firm in Minneapolis. Yet the effect tends to be transitory, he said, and the attraction of the academies to students and their families remains powerful.

“It’s the best education at the least price,” Hall said. “You can’t find a better deal.”