The majority of applicants are white males, so it makes sense that the majority of those receiving appointments would be white males. Many URMs just aren't interested in the military, and don't apply. Others just aren't qualified. DS is a white male living in an under represented district (by one block!). Before his MOC interview, he overheard the committee discussing the applicants, and it was apparent that they really did not have many who were anywhere close to being qualified. This, of course, was great for DS, who was given the principal nomination. I must add, however, lest some think that DS is a mediocre appointee, that he was told by both Senatorial committees that his resume was one of the most impressive they had ever seen. I feel certain that, if our MOCs didn't "talk" in order to nominate as many as possible, he would have gotten Senatorial noms as well.
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I don't think that this is necessarily true. Honestly, we dont apply because we just don't know the academies exist. I didn't find out about the AFA until after it was too late to apply last year and had just learned about AFROTC the year before. My high school was made up almost entirely of URM but, interestingly enough, the top 5% was mostly made up of the few white students. Maybe 25% of us were Black and I could count the number of hispanics on one hand. So the AP program was pretty good, but every other part of my school's education program sucked( I looked at a couple of the posted resumes of kids applying to academies last year and, often times, I had never heard of more than half the ECs listed because my school/area didn't have them).
I can say that URM hs students are not at all necessarily less patriotic than white students. We are not less interested in the military, it's that many are never told about the opportunities. It has been my experience that the Blacks and Hispanics I've met are very supportive of military service, but its not something they had thought of doing themselves. The ones that
have thought about it, enlist, and even most of them had never heard of ROTC or the academies. Even coming from a military family, I'm lucky that I learned about ROTC when I did because my family sure didn't know enough about it to mention it. During the application process and even after I got an ROTC scholarship(which unlike the the academies, I am told, doesn't take race into consideration btw) whenever I talked to someone about what wanted to do, I'd get "Cool, so...you're, like, enlisting? But I thought you were going to X University?" I had to explain over and over again that no, I was not enlisting and yes, I was still going to college but that I'd be training to be an officer. Some got it, but others remained confused. I think that that is the problem. Many students, URM and otherwise, just don't know these types of service opportunities exist, but I feel like this ignorance is worse amoung URMs. It's about what you are exposed to and, although there are URMs that live in the same educational environment as the white applicants with stunning resumes, I would venture to say that a greater percentage do not. I've moved around quite a bit and have attended schools that Were polar opposites of each other, in every school I attended where most students were white, the education system was good, in the ones made up of mostly URMs it was bad, schools with about equal distribution ranged from adverage to fairly good.
Don't flame me, this has only been my personal experience with this matter, I understand that it is by no means representative. This is also not to blame kids with more opportunities for having them or to say whoe to the URM kid. I do wish that I had been exposed to this earlier, but I don't resent those that were, it just is what it is. I only wanted to point out that the aforementioned quote is not necessarily true.