Amazing Military Academy MOC Nomination Data

murfthesurf

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I have never understood why one MOC eagerly publishes the Nominations list every year, and others, perhaps in a District next door, do not. Then I found this link (below) to data gathered by the AP.

It shows some astounding things that are going on each year. Many MOC's appear not to publish Names because they are nominating only 1-3 kids per Academy!

Data is only for USNA, USMA and USAFA !

http://exploredoc.com/doc/3569287/moc-academy-nominations-with-year-low-breakout-30-may
 
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I notice that trend in the "less competitive areas", maybe not as low as 1-3 but it seems some areas just don't have enough applicants to fill the maximum that they're eligible to nominate.
 
Oh wow this is amazing data. I love data. Our area is very competitive (Ben Cardin, Barbara Mikulski, and Steny Hoyer) and I noticed that in some years they did not nominate 10 candidates. I wonder why that is.....
 
Oh wow this is amazing data. I love data. Our area is very competitive (Ben Cardin, Barbara Mikulski, and Steny Hoyer) and I noticed that in some years they did not nominate 10 candidates. I wonder why that is.....

What really stands out is that the USAFA is the only Academy where MOC will nominate 30-40 kids!!

If you download the file into PDF and run a search you can easily *NO OTHER** Academy comes close !

Look at the USNA columns, I checked and could not find a single MOC nominating more that 20 kids! USMA occasionally has a 21 Kid slate.

I wonder what is going on at USAFA that motivates a MOC to submit a slate of 40 Kids?

It appears to happen only with this school.
 
I have had the privilege of working with our congressional staffs on various events and, while all staffs (and their boss) are different, all have a strong desire to send the best of the candidates to the service academys for the good of the country. They are very patriotic in spite of all the jabs in the media regarding politicians these days. When a slate has not been filled with 10 nominees, it many times is the fact the admission staff of the MOC just did not find find a full 10 people who they wanted to see become a military officer. One of our MOC has minimum standards far higher than the academys themselves. You would think that a political office would scatter around as many noms as possible just to keep dad and mom taxpayer happy no matter how unqualified their kid is and let the Academy turn them down. But not so. The staffs put a lot of work into academy admissions and they want to produce great candidates for the Academy to mull over. It is really a professional pride thing and, as voters, I think we should be glad they make the system work.
 
What really stands out is that the USAFA is the only Academy where MOC will nominate 30-40 kids!!

I wonder what is going on at USAFA that motivates a MOC to submit a slate of 40 Kids?

It appears to happen only with this school.

By law, each MoC can have 5 cadets at each SA. They can submit 10 names per each empty spot. if they are submitting 40 names, it means that they only have 1 cadet from that district currently attending USAFA. It might be a geographical thing. People from some district are more inclined to apply to USNA and USMA
 
I see that in my state, Mi., Senator Levin many years nominated only a few. I guarantee that every year there are several hundred candidates who apply each year, and I know with his successor, Gary Peters, they interviewed 250 according to the aid who handled the process. I suspect Peters limited nominations. I know my son, who has a very competitive application, and who received Nominations to USMA, USNA, and USAFA from the Representative, and another to USMA from Senator Stabenow, got no nominations from Peters. He was hoping to get a second nom for USNA.

I do believe that as a general rule the MOC's and their staff handles these without much in terms of politics. However, I think it would be naïve to think it is a politic free process entirely.

It seems at least in Michigan the congressional reps select first, and then the senators wait, and compare notes. Stabenow announced hers, but didn't send them to the academies until after Peters finally made his nominations. I have been told that they wont duplicate nominations. I disagree with that philosophy. They should all nominate the top ten best candidates. Theoretically, and actual in a practical sense as well, someone can receive a congressional rep nomination, but not win the slot. then, because a senator sees that the kid already received a nomination, doesn't award him/her one, and instead gives only nominations to the kids that didn't get one from his/her Rep, which may mean kids who are far less deserving than the one who effectively finished a close second. Sure the NWL may still be an option, but the most deserving should have the best shots to win the slates.

....but I digress.
 
Spud, I totally agree with your statement, and I will grant that this data does not reflect what is eventually "charged" to the MOC.

However, it shows (4) consecutive Years of Data to allow you to see the Pattern in each MOC's slates.

I was just pointing out that I ONLY see the USAFA having MOC Nomination slates of 30-40 kids and I am not suggesting anything nefarious is going on, it may even be a line in the law from when the USAFA was created that allows this ability.

I am more interested in MOCs with nominations of less than 3-5 kids per school and what were the reasons behind that. These districts with low numbers are many and they are NOT in MOC's from UTAH or ND, but districts in IL, PA, VA, WV, IN, CA !

Look at PA-14 as an example. That's Doyle in Pittsburgh, PA. He never releases public news on his slates. I wouldn't either with low numbers like that for FOUR YEARS of nomination slates !
 
Yes I was wondering if that could be the reason my MOC never released the list of nominees when he has done such in the past years. Now seeing this I do remember that the amount of nominees at the reception banquet was extremely low, (10-15 for all three SA combined so maybe that is the reason for no press release!
 
Remember each House district generally represents about the SAME number of people. Does not matter if its a district in Maryland or in Utah, that's part of the beauty of our Constitution; it is structured to make Congressional Representative in the House accountable to approx. the same number of people.

No press release = low numbers? In most cases, I would say that's a good reason why some would not put out a release
 

Thanks for what appears to be a very interesting and somewhat surprising dataset. Do you have any published article or report which provided an analysis of the data? A quick Google doesn't seem to turn up any articles.

I'm quite surprised by the low numbers for some areas. I am wondering if they are tied to the demographics of the district. I understand that some of this might be that the MOC is being more diligent in screening. However, there are high school students almost everywhere in our country who economically would be in need of a scholarship. I appreciate that interest in "Serving" should be more of a driver than need for a scholarship. However, I am quite surprised by the number of representatives who evidently have insufficient demand to put forward a 1o person slate. Unless all the ones with fewer than 10 are principal nominations and in those cases they don't wish to put forward a full slate. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of some of the nomination practices of the districts with low numbers?

It's also strange that so many CBC and CHC MOC members have low counts? I'm assuming those are Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus respectively. It really causes me to question how the low numbers could be.

Has anyone seen any published analysis relating to this table from a well known source? I've found some blogs similarly claiming AP publishing data for five years of nominations in 2009. But Google isn't turning up anything from AP. I'm reluctant to post links to blogs.
 
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I guess I haven't been paying attention and shouldn't have been surprised by the low number of nominations in some districts. It's evidently very old news. A search does turn up a 2010 RAND study titled "Diversity of Service Academy Entrants and Graduates": http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG917.html

The RAND article mentions some efforts by the SAs to improve upon representation as well as outreach programs with Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus to increase the number of nominations from those districts. So I take it low nominations from certain areas has been widely known and something which they are trying to improve.
 
What really stands out is that the USAFA is the only Academy where MOC will nominate 30-40 kids!!

If you download the file into PDF and run a search you can easily *NO OTHER** Academy comes close !

Look at the USNA columns, I checked and could not find a single MOC nominating more that 20 kids! USMA occasionally has a 21 Kid slate.

I wonder what is going on at USAFA that motivates a MOC to submit a slate of 40 Kids?

It appears to happen only with this school.
Okay, first I'd love to know the source of this; maybe it was listed earlier and I just missed it.

I went through the list and checked the numbers for members of the Arizona delegation; specifically Jeff Flake (I served on his USAFA board for 8 years) and his USAFA nominations matched what I had in my notes. Then I went and looked at some of those that had numbers of 20, and up to 41. So...knowing what I know about the process, both practically and legally, here's what that tells me. The MOC either had a staff that didn't know what they were doing or that member was "out going" and didn't care. Here's why I say this.

If you dig into 10 U.S. Code §...you'll find a section for each service academy (not USCGA) that uses the nomination process. The process is laid out clearly, if in legalese. Bottom line is: a MOC may nominate 10 individuals for each "credited to them" opening they have at an academy. So...if I have three cadets at USMA graduate in 2016, and I have two others there (class of 2017, and 2018) I could nominate 30 kids and send three into the class of 2020 that would be "credited" to me as the MOC. BUT...then I have to wait until the next opening to nominate anyone, which is fine; I'll have one in 2017 and one in 2018. BUT...that would mean that with nobody graduating in 2019, I would have five at the academy and could not nominate anyone that year.

This is why MOST MOC's have their staff keep close tabs on the numbers and typically only nominate 10 kids and fill one slot. Occasionally I've seen 20 nominees as the math worked out well. I've never sat on a board where more than 20 were made. I've also sat on a board where we had 40 candidates for 10 nominations at USAFA (1 opening) and we only had 9 candidates for USMA (had two slots to fill) and we asked kids if they would be interested in a nomination to USMA?

All that being said, some of the numbers from the document don't make sense to me...I'd love to see the entire document so I could better analyze it.

Steve
USAFA ALO
USAFA '83
 
Okay, first I'd love to know the source of this; maybe it was listed earlier and I just missed it.

I went through the list and checked the numbers for members of the Arizona delegation; specifically Jeff Flake (I served on his USAFA board for 8 years) and his USAFA nominations matched what I had in my notes. Then I went and looked at some of those that had numbers of 20, and up to 41. So...knowing what I know about the process, both practically and legally, here's what that tells me. The MOC either had a staff that didn't know what they were doing or that member was "out going" and didn't care. Here's why I say this.

If you dig into 10 U.S. Code §...you'll find a section for each service academy (not USCGA) that uses the nomination process. The process is laid out clearly, if in legalese. Bottom line is: a MOC may nominate 10 individuals for each "credited to them" opening they have at an academy. So...if I have three cadets at USMA graduate in 2016, and I have two others there (class of 2017, and 2018) I could nominate 30 kids and send three into the class of 2020 that would be "credited" to me as the MOC. BUT...then I have to wait until the next opening to nominate anyone, which is fine; I'll have one in 2017 and one in 2018. BUT...that would mean that with nobody graduating in 2019, I would have five at the academy and could not nominate anyone that year.

This is why MOST MOC's have their staff keep close tabs on the numbers and typically only nominate 10 kids and fill one slot. Occasionally I've seen 20 nominees as the math worked out well. I've never sat on a board where more than 20 were made. I've also sat on a board where we had 40 candidates for 10 nominations at USAFA (1 opening) and we only had 9 candidates for USMA (had two slots to fill) and we asked kids if they would be interested in a nomination to USMA?

All that being said, some of the numbers from the document don't make sense to me...I'd love to see the entire document so I could better analyze it.

Steve
USAFA ALO
USAFA '83


Steve makes good sense, as I have spoken to a MOC coordinator who was brand new and didn't even understand the difference between a Principal slate and a ranked slate was. I ended up explaining some of the info we take for granted in this forum!
 
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