Gumby, please see my previous posts.
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If anyone believes the service academies are top academic institutions, that's fine with me ... we are all entitled to our own opinions.
Gentlemen
I also have no interest in arguing this matter, but would like to express my opinion based on my involvement with service academies in a previous life that I don't really want to rehash.
Many valid points have been made. The question of the academic value of military academies is not an easy one. Many studies have been made by private and public groups, all the way to Congress, with no clear answers, but with continuous attention paid to preservation and improvement of academic standards. Each Academy has a Board of Visitors that includes some of the nations' top academics who pay close attention to preserving the academy's standings commensurate with their goals and the quality of their incoming students. Also, keep in mind that the academies are undergraduate institutions, and it's fair to compare them with other undergraduate schools, but not with graduate programs.
A few observations.
The academies have little problem attracting the cream of the crop among high school students, and are among the most selective in the nation. Even though they are not purely academic institutions, they hold their own year in and year out in national rankings. USAFA, for example, is usually rated at the top of undergraduate engineering schools in the nation, and was recently rated the top in the west in the US News & World Report on America's Best Colleges.
That having been said, the academies don't, nor do they want to, compete with MIT, Cal Tech, or Harvard in attracting and selecting the top pure academic talent. In fact, they would not be likely to admit a straight - A student if that individual lacked interest in a military career or lacked a well-rounded personality -- they would probably suggest to that individual that they should instead apply to one of the previously mentioned schools.
Military academies are there for one purpose only -- to provide to the nation the best and most capable military officers possible. Whether they do this is a case for a different debate but not debatable is that, while producing military officers, they also do a fair job of filling a large number of Rhodes, Fullbright, and other programs. West Point is 4th in the nation in the number of Rhodes Scholars, for example.
Do MIT or Cal Tech produce a better research scientist than a military academy? Probably, as well they should, since that conforms closer to their role. That's not to say that a graduate from a civilian institution is any smarter or more capable of accomplishing greatness, just that they may have obtained a more specialized academic education.
By the way, I'm not a graduate of an academy, but am a retired military officer. I did learn certain academic subjects at more depth, but I had the luxury of dedicating my time to those subjects (that is, when I wasn't wasting my time drinking beer). That's the double edged sword of the academies -- the intensive training they provide across all areas comes at the expense of restricting personal time and, one might argue, personal growth.
This is one of the themes that periodically arises in studies of military academies -- and the results are usually as expected -- that cadets obtain a first-class education as well as tremendous training in athletics and leadership of others, but they fall behind their civilian counterparts in personal maturity because they haven't had the opportunity to explore dead ends and learn from hard knocks. That may have been what Churchill was referring to, and I agree with part of his premise but not his conclusion.
As I said, this is a very difficult topic, but whatever one's opinion, there's little doubt in my own mind that academies have, and produce, some of the best talent in America.
