DOD Service Academies

The Army, Air Force, and Navy spend millions of dollars each year to run prep schools coaching students for admission to the service academies. The schools' missions, however, are not clearly defined, and the schools appear to be pursuing different goals for specific subgroups, such as enlisted personnel, women, minorities, and recruited athletes--the main groups the schools now serve. For example, about half of the students at the Air Force prep school are recruited athletes, almost double the percentage at the Army and Navy Schools. Further, the Defense Department has limited information on the quality of the schools' programs and lacks the ability to assess whether the schools are cost-effective. GAO estimates that the Navy, Army, and Air Force prep programs cost about $39,800, $50,900, and $60,900, respectively, for each student.

GAO found that: (1) the schools' missions are not clearly defined, since the Department of Defense (DOD) has neither formalized the schools' missions nor monitored their operations; (2) initially, the services established the schools to prepare enlisted personnel for admission to the service academies, but now the schools appear to be pursuing differing goals regarding such specific subgroups as enlisted personnel, females, minorities, and recruited athletes; (3) academy faculty have periodically assessed the operations of their respective schools, but their assessments have not been made against a uniform set of quality and performance standards; (4) DOD has not established the criteria it needs to evaluate the schools; (5) DOD has not issued guidelines on how the services should estimate the schools' operating costs and does not require the schools to regularly report on such costs; (6) the Navy, Army, and Air Force preparatory programs cost about $39,800, $50,900, and $60,900, respectively, for each student entering an academy, almost as much or more than it costs to send someone to the corresponding academy for a year and about 2.5 to 4 times the cost of sending a student to a top college for a year; and (7) preparatory school students' academic and military performance at the academies is somewhat below the performance average of cadets and midshipmen who did not attend a preparatory school, but since DOD has not established performance goals for the preparatory schools, it does not have a basis for evaluating whether the results the schools achieve are satisfactory.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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