The United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs is being sued over its admissions policies by the same anti-affirmative action group that won a landmark Supreme Court case against Harvard in June 2023.
In that decision, the Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admissions policies in higher education were unconstitutional. Military academies were exempted from the ruling, though, because the justices noted they may have special interests, saying in part that “history teaches that racial diversity is a national security imperative.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor used the Vietnam War in her dissenting opinion as an example of a time when racial imbalance threatened the integrity of the nation’s military. She said it fueled perceptions of minorities being used as “cannon fodder.” However, the Court did not specify what the academies’ specialized interests may be or what policies the academies should revise, if any.
Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. filed its latest lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday to challenge the broad exemption laid out in the Court’s ruling. It claims that “the [Air Force] Academy has no justification for using race-based admissions,” and that “its [current admissions] policy would be unconstitutional at all other public institutions of higher education.”
The Colorado lawsuit also states that the current admission policies violate the Fifth Amendment “because race is a ‘positive’ for minority applicants who receive preferences, it is necessarily a ‘negative’ for all others.” It also knocks the academy for not doing enough to verify whether applicants’ listed race is accurate.
A spokesperson for the Air Force Academy said in a statement to CPR News that it does not comment on pending litigation. Lawyers for Students for Fair Admissions have not yet responded to a request for comment.
In November 2023, the Department of Justice defended race-conscious admissions at military academies, saying in part that “the most senior leaders in the Armed Forces have repeatedly concluded that a more diverse officer corps makes a more effective force: more lethal, more likely to attract and retain top talent, and more legitimate in the eyes of the nation and the world.”
The brief followed another lawsuit from Students for Fair Admission in 2023 that sought to prohibit West Point from using race to foster diversity in the Army officer corps. The West Point lawsuit is proceeding to trial, while a separate lawsuit against the Naval Academy was struck down last Friday.
Air Force leaders have put a higher priority on diversity over the last decade
Students for Fair Admissions’ new lawsuit comes two years after the Air Force increased its diversity goals in response to a report from a Diversity and Inclusion task force created in 2020. That group is charged with identifying and changing policies, procedures, barriers and other practices that unfairly impact Air Force and Space Force troops from underrepresented groups.
In its first year, the task force laid out disparities in race, ethnicity, and gender in both the Air and Space Force branches. It also revealed disparities in the way minority members were disciplined and how difficult it was for them to increase their rank. The Air Force Officer Corps is currently 77 percent white.
“The lack of diversity [among] officers … directly impacts diversity in senior leader representation and also influences the disparities throughout the lifecycle of an Airman or Guardian,” the report found. “Survey respondents pointed to the lack of mentors in senior positions who could relate to the minority member’s or female’s experiences; they also cited [a] lack of general officers who looked like them.”
Those findings are in line with numbers from the Air Force Personnel Center that show 16 percent of enlisted service members in the Air and Space Force branches identified as Black in 2024, while just 6.4 percent of officers identified as such. By comparison, an estimated 13 percent of the nation is Black.
Diversity among the officer ranks, which are heavily supplemented by military academy graduates, is something the Air Force has been working on since 2014.
That year, then-Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James signed a memorandum stating that 30 percent of officers who graduated from the academy should be part of underrepresented racial or ethnic groups and that 30 percent of them should also be female.
The Air Force Academy class that will graduate in 2025 exceeds the racial diversity goal with 32 percent of admitted cadets being from underrepresented groups. It missed the mark just slightly for women, though, with female cadets making up 29 percent of the class.
The current breakdown of the Air Force’s overall diversity goals is as follows:
- 67.5 percent white (down from the 2014 goal of 80 percent)
- 13 percent Black/African American (up from 10 percent)
- 10 percent Asian (up from 8 percent)
- 7 percent multiracial (no previous goal set)
- 1.5 percent American Indian/Native Alaskan (up from 1 percent)
- 1 percent Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (no change)
Compared to the U.S. at large, the figures sought by the USAF would still disproportionately represent white people, who make up 60 percent of the nation’s population.
The current class of first-year cadets who will graduate in 2028 is one of the most diverse classes in the USAF Academy’s history, with 38 percent of cadets identifying as racial or ethnic minorities.
Air Force Academy admissions are extremely competitive, regardless of race
During the oral arguments in the 2023 affirmative action case that led to the military academy exemption by the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar mentioned the competitive nature of the schools as evidence in favor of diverse admissions policies.
“Our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of a diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer,” she said. “At present, it's not possible to achieve that diversity without race-conscious admissions.”
Admittance to the Air Force Academy is incredibly competitive. It has an 11 percent acceptance rate, making it more exclusive than the likes of UC Berkeley and Notre Dame.
Prospective cadets are scored on a combination of class rank and their grade point average, on top of regular test scores. Scores among admitted applicants are typically between 1250 and 1450 for the SAT and between 28 and 33 on the ACT. Applicants must also have a recommendation from their congressional representative, plus a list of extracurriculars.
Compared to the 18.1 million students enrolled in colleges or universities across the nation, military academies account for just 15,000 students. That’s less than one percent of the country’s total student population.
