From Washington Post, June 21st
My two cents, the admissions office could have gave a better answer.
My answer would have been that the number of admitted female candidates are reflective of number of female applicants. Female qualified vs admitted is about 2% less than males, but I suspect that number can be easily accounted by soldier applicants.
Class of 2016 profile
Men Women Total
Applicant Files Started... 12,101....3,070.. 15,171
Nominated....................... 3,553.......732.... 4,285
Qualified (in academics and
physical aptitude)........ 2,191.......438.... 2,629
Admitted..................... 1,002.......191.... 1,193
We had some previous discussions about legality of SA admissions goal/quota. My guess is that since SAs are different from normal colleges, so different set of rules.
West Point is considered a progressive institution where women have been enrolled for almost 40 years. But the number of female cadets has remained low. The academy’s first integrated class, the Class of 1980, was 10 percent female. In the more than three decades since then, the representation of women has not risen above 16 percent. Why do so few young women attend this prestigious — and taxpayer-funded — academy when, as of 2011, women earn 56 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded nationwide?
Participants at a recent conference on women at West Point put this question to the academy’s administrators, professors and staff. Their answer was not that the applicant pool contained few qualified women or that the academy was admitting all qualified women who applied. Instead, we were told, the admissions office follows an explicit “class composition goal” for women, which was set at 14 to 16 percent for class years 2008 to 2013.
To calculate the academy’s goal for women, leaders apparently rely on Army demographics. Because women make up roughly 15 percent of the active Army, the leadership has decided that the West Point admissions office should aim to enroll no more women than would constitute 16 percent of the class. As a document we received from a member of the West Point board of visitors observes, this method for setting the class composition goal ensures that the academy’s “demographic future will replicate the Army’s demographic past at best.”
The crucial question is whether the goal functions as a tool to increase the historically low number of female cadets or as a quota on — that is, an allocation for — the number to be admitted. Under Supreme Court case law — the most relevant cases are Regents of University of California v. Bakke, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger — college admissions quotas, whether designed to operate for or against members of a protected class, are automatically suspect and are almost sure to be struck down as violations of equal protection of the law. Although those cases involved quotas based on race, there is every reason to believe that the court would strike down a backward-looking, rigid sex-based quota like this one as well.
My two cents, the admissions office could have gave a better answer.
My answer would have been that the number of admitted female candidates are reflective of number of female applicants. Female qualified vs admitted is about 2% less than males, but I suspect that number can be easily accounted by soldier applicants.
Class of 2016 profile
Men Women Total
Applicant Files Started... 12,101....3,070.. 15,171
Nominated....................... 3,553.......732.... 4,285
Qualified (in academics and
physical aptitude)........ 2,191.......438.... 2,629
Admitted..................... 1,002.......191.... 1,193
We had some previous discussions about legality of SA admissions goal/quota. My guess is that since SAs are different from normal colleges, so different set of rules.