WASHINGTON—Members of Congress set a record last year of more than 6,600 nominations for prospective students seeking to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, the academy’s dean of admissions said Monday.
Students applying to the three major service academies, including the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy, must be nominated by a member of Congress or another high-ranking federal official. Congressional nominations account for about 75 percent of all the nominations received by students.
The schools have been working hard in recent years to increase the number of nominations from congressional districts that are underrepresented at the schools, including some urban areas with high numbers of minorities and several Western states. The Navy has been focusing on making the officers’ ranks more representative of the enlisted force in recent years.
“This is a very important part of our overall strategy,” Bruce Latta, the dean of admissions, told the school’s Board of Visitors. “We’re trying to do our best to make sure that every congressman and senator has somebody at the Naval Academy from a congressional district.”
An Associated Press review of congressional nominations last year that examined five years of nominations made by members of Congress to all three major service academies found that big-city congressional districts with large numbers of minorities were among the lowest nominating districts.
Latta noted some New York City congressional districts that haven’t nominated many students in the past have been making progress. All congressional districts in New York City had at least one nomination and one acceptance to the school last year.
“We’re actually doing very, very well in New York,” Latta said in an interview.
Latta said only four congressional districts did not nominate a student to the school last year. The academy did not immediately release those four districts.
“Since I’ve been here, that’s definitely the fewest,” Latta said, noting that he arrive at the school in 2002.
Typically, members of Congress make about 5,000 nominations a year, Latta said. The highest previous number of nominations was for the class of 1991, when the number of nominations for students to the school were just under 6,000. Latta noted that the class of 1991 entered in 1987—the year after the film “Top Gun” was in theaters.
The Naval Academy’s class of 2014 included the most applications in the school’s history—17,417. It also included the highest number of minority and female applications. A typical class at the academy has about 1,230 students.
In other business, board member Nancy Johnson said she believes a November report by the Office of the Naval Inspector General unfairly criticized spending practices at the academy. She said school officials were held to a government standard that was different from Navy standards that academy leaders had operated under in good faith.
“Frankly, it was so absurd that I’ve never gotten over it, and I think that honorable people were demeaned by that investigation and its conclusions,” Johnson said.
The report was a factor in shortening the tenure of former Superintendent Jeffrey Fowler, who retired in August.
Michael Hightower, the chairman of the board, said the board is planning to bring a set of recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy on how to clarify how the school can spend certain funds for positive purposes.
The Office of the Naval Inspector General’s 110-page report concluded that a slush fund used by the Naval Academy Business Services Division was “a sham” with little accountability. The report also noted that expenditures made from the fund were “extravagant and wasteful.”
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