Unlike most public colleges and  universities that are “only” subsidized to the tune of 40-70 percent (not counting the subsidy within the student loan programs), and where students must nonetheless pay the difference in tuition, the military academies are 100 percent taxpayer funded. Moreover, they are subject to no serious oversight and no one asks if any of them achieve their stated goals of churning out the country’s most educated and brilliant students.

Far from being rigorous academic institutions, the academies are places for job training that turn out people who by graduation have already been living completely off the taxpayer for years, and who are likely to go the next couple of decades without ever holding a job in the private sector or being a net tax payer.

The academies function as propaganda mills for military “tradition” and exist to turn out a new generation of influential government employees who will call for even more money to be spent on their alma maters.  The academies also provide a nice safe environment for politicians to go and be bathed in the adulation of their subordinates and political supporters, such as when George W. Bush traveled to the Air Force Academy to chest bump cadets.

Yesterday in Salon, Bruce Fleming, a member of the Naval Academy faculty, nicely described just what a boondoggle these institutions are:

Training is something the military does—education, certainly, is not. Indeed, undergraduate education of officers has already largely been outsourced, since most new officers come from the much cheaper Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at civilian universities (at one-quarter the cost of the academies), or from the several months of Officer Training Corps (one-eighth the cost) that follows either an enlisted career, or college. By all standards, these officers are just as good as those who come from the service academies, which now produce under 20 percent of U.S. officers…

 

Who benefits from these strange historical holdovers? Not the taxpayers who fund them. The service academies are the vanity projects of the brass who went there. Their interest is in looking good (it’s good for their careers) and in keeping the tax dollars flowing. All official information taxpayers get about the service academies comes from the brass who run them and who use them as their private country clubs — at taxpayer expense. Military subordinates (which includes the students) are legally unable to offer conflicting views. The result is that the service academies are feel-good hype factories that operate with virtually no accountability and little oversight, the very definition of government bloat on autopilot…

Oh, yes—there’s one more group of people who defend these places to the death: the parents of the young military members who attend them. Why wouldn’t they?  Having their children admitted is a government-sponsored guarantee of a golden ticket to life: college at taxpayer expense with no student debts, the highest salary of any set of graduates, and guaranteed employment and (no-Obamacare-necessary) health benefits for at least five years, frequently well beyond. And no, most people in the military aren’t remotely likely to be shot at…

The service academies in the new millennium are little more than military Disneylands for tourists. They are also cash cows for the brass who send their own children there at taxpayer expense: the children of multiple current and past administrators have gotten this taxpayer-supported present, which looks to me like (illegal) nepotism. And far from “imbu[ing] them with the highest ideals,” the service academies are in fact the graveyards of the ideals of students who come looking for something that transcends the watery values of secular humanism that are the best many other institutions can offer…

The brass retire there in great style, and frequently have their funerals there. (When a recent Chief of Naval Operations retired there, the students were forbidden from walking on the pathways for the whole day.) Those picked to return as administrators to USNA live in high-ceilinged Victorian houses complete with groundskeepers. The superintendent, a three-star admiral, has a mini-White House with white-coated waitstaff.  It’s a great life for them, so of course they defend it…

And so on. 

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