HOW THE MILITARY CAN SAVE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

• Author: Norris, Will
• Position: U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School

SERVICE ACADEMIES LIKE WEST POINT HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW TO DIVERSIFY ADMISSIONS WITHOUT SACRIFICING HIGH STANDARDS--OR RUNNING AFOUL OF THE SUPREME COURT. CIVILIAN COLLEGES SHOULD DO THE SAME.

In high school, Brieon Fonoti knew what attending a high-quality four-year college could mean for his life. "School was always the goal," he says. But growing up in a poor neighborhood in Long Beach, California, where he attended "a lot of inner-city schools," even the state's well-funded public colleges felt unattainable. His mother, who raised him and his three siblings by herself, cycled between jobs--call centers, the post office--and struggled to make ends meet. Looking for a better life, Fonoti heard that the military often pays for higher education after a period of service. "I was trying to do something to make it easier on myself financially," he told me. "And so, I joined the Army."

After graduating from high school in 2017, Fonoti, whose mother is Black and father is Samoan, left Long Beach for a paralegal position with the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG Corps, at Fort Riley in Kansas. "I was looking for a job that would transfer over to the civilian side," he explained, and paralegal work held such promise. There, a senior officer recognized his talent. "You work hard," he recalled the officer saying. "You're really smart. Why don't you go to school and become an officer?" The way to become an officer was through the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, so he applied. Because of Fonoti's middling high school grades, West Point didn't accept him outright, but instead offered him a spot at the U.S. Military Academy Preparatory School (USMAPS), located at a nearby satellite campus. USMAPS allows promising applicants who need to catch up to their peers academically to spend a full school year taking small-group academic courses and preparing to reapply for West Point. The JAG Corps officer who recognized Fonoti's talent had also gone through USMAPS, and encouraged him to accept the invitation. About 40 percent of the 240 or so would-be cadets who attend USMAPS every year are Black, and many, like Fonoti, come from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Though he was at first hesitant to say yes because it meant investing a year of his time, once Fonoti started at USMAPS in the fall of 2020, he felt supported academically in a way he never had before. "I was touching subjects I had never taken in high school," he said. "Like, I never took calculus, I never took physics." He served as battalion commander, a leadership role similar to class president, for one semester, and finished 30th in his class out of more than 200. When he reapplied to West Point in the spring, he was accepted.

Fonoti completed his sophomore year at West Point this past spring. He's majoring in law and is ranked about 800th out of 1,200 in his class--an impressive feat for a student of his background at West Point, a college that is as selective as Georgetown. To have finally realized his dream can feel surreal, he told me. "Even now sometimes I'm walking around, like, damn, I kind of--kind of go here," he said, incredulous, on a sunlit day this spring. We sat outside the campus's formidable gray-brick dining hall, the Hudson River rushing below. A statue of Douglas MacArthur loomed nearby.

Fonoti's remarkable story is far from unique at West Point: In recent decades, the school has used its long-running preparatory program, which about 42 percent of Black cadets go through, to build a more racially and economically diverse student body than most other selective schools. Black cadets make up about 15 percent of the West Point student body, double the percentage of most Ivy League colleges, and graduate at a similar rate as white cadets. Black West Point graduates also achieve the rank of major early in their career nearly as often as white graduates.

Like other race-conscious admissions programs, USMAPS is designed to help promising recruits who may be lagging academically because of their socioeconomic background. But it does so in a way that civilian colleges seldom do--by building up those students' academic abilities to match those of their more privileged peers. In other words, students who excel at USMAPS prove through their performance that they are worthy of admission.

For colleges looking to find ways to achieve racial diversity after the Supreme Court's June decision eliminating affirmative action in college admissions, USMAPS may provide an answer. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and a sister case involving the University of North Carolina, the Court ruled it illegal for colleges to give minority students an advantage based on their race. USMAPS shows that a...