College ranking season is upon us. The Wall Street Journal just came out with its rankings for 2024 — a marvelously chaotic and weird arrangement of schools. Brown, they ranked 67th. UChicago, 36th. Johns Hopkins was 99th… Barely in the top 100. Wild. Glorious!

Some people hate rankings, other people love them. There are two moments when rankings are actually quite important — when you’re applying to colleges, to get a sense of whether and how you’re going to be able to afford your child / childrens’ / your own education, and when you’re graduating and applying to jobs. At those moments, college rankings are extremely important. For the rest of one’s life, rankings are a way of kidding around with your friends about how much better your school is than theirs.

But for people interested in commissioning as officers through an ROTC, there’s a problem — year to year it’s very difficult to establish whether one’s school has a good or great ROTC program. It’s only knowable in retrospect. A good or great commander and command team might give way to an unmotivated or toxic commander. Much depends, too, on the cadets and midshipmen who make up a class. With one exception we’ll cover below, there’s no way to know for sure.

THE BIG STORY

How to Rank the ROTCs

Figuring out how to weight ROTC programs presents special challenges.

One might think that there’s an easy and straightforward way to evaluate ROTC programs. After all, they make up the single largest commissioning source for military officers in the U.S. For people interested in maximizing their military training through an ROTC, but uninterested in (or unable to) attending one of the service academies, this is a big question. If one’s committed to joining the military, how does one do that most effectively and efficiently?

This isn’t something that occurred to me as a student — my college, Yale, did not have ROTCs when I attended or graduated in 2002. Two ROTCs — Air Force and Navy — returned to Yale in 2012 after the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. I never gave ROTC any thought at the time when I might have learned the most about it.

Later, as a board member and then President of the Yale Veterans Association (YVA) I had the occasion to see 5 different ROTC command teams, as Air Force and Naval ROTC grew on campus. Different leaders, different staffs, different classes of cadets and midshipmen.

How does one quantify all of that? I’m not sure I could make a good apples-to-apples comparison of the ROTC classes at Yale with each other. How then does one make a fair or accurate big-picture comparison, by which to arrive at the conclusion that, for example, “if you want to be a Navy SEAL, Yale has the best program” (it doesn’t) or “if you want to be a fighter pilot, Harvard has the best program” (it doesn’t).

These are questions for which — as far as I can tell from a couple days doing research online — there are no great answers.

The research turned up one thing that’s probably obvious in retrospect, though it wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind when considering ROTCs, as it isn’t (but maybe should be) synonymous with the program. There are — of course! — service academies that aren’t fully funded by the government; private institutions that are relics of a time before the military was fully modernized, as it is today.

Norwich University, The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute — these are three institutions of higher learning that are, pound for pound, as close as one gets to the experience of a service academy (USMA, The Naval Academy, The Air Force Academy) without the hard 4-year service obligation after graduation. What is the commissioning source for these colleges? ROTC.

One of the best students in my MCCC (Maneuver Captain’s Career Course) was a VMI grad — he went on to lead a Special Forces team in Afghanistan, then got out to write a book; I stayed in touch with him over the years. Several other students in my IOBC (Infantry Officer Basic Course) in 2005-6 were VMI grads.

What are the best ROTC programs? Likely some of the top programs are in those three schools. That’s fairly easy. But how else would one measure program performance?

Here are the variables that might be worth measuring, in no particular order: (1) general level officers produced by the programs over the years (2) competitions and awards won by the ROTC programs over the years (3) quality/ranking of the college hosting the ROTC program (4) traditions at the ROTC over the years, and (5) professional success of program graduates.

Year to year the quality of a particular program would likely vary as leadership, staff, and cadet/midshipmen classes changed and turned over, so it would never be a perfect assessment. But one could get a general idea of an ROTC program at a particular college, and compare it with programs at other colleges. In such a way it would be possible to say with certainty that, for example, Duke or UNC or Texas A&M had a better Air Force ROTC program than Yale, or that MIT or Virginia Tech had a better Army ROTC program than the University of New Haven.

As things stand, the strength of a particular ROTC program and how it is viewed by the college or university that hosts it is largely a matter of word of mouth and local reputation, with the notable exceptions of VMI, The Citadel, and Norwich. Students hoping to attend a good program and class will have to do a fair bit of research, and ask around. Is the ROTC commander good, inspiring? Or are they disliked? When did they arrive and when are they supposed to turn over to a new ROTC commander? What’s the culture like?

It’s not an ideal method for developing knowledge about a place, but it is realistic. And one wants to know before one gets to a unit whether that unit is a place you want to spend four years of your life — at the same time that you’re studying for a bachelor’s degree!

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