“Merit” is making a comeback in higher education. Next stop: U.S. service academies.

College officials around the country—including those at some of the most selective (and notoriously left-leaning) schools—have admitted a student’s high school grades and often-obscure extracurricular activities aren’t enough for making admissions decisions.

Now, schools that abandoned use of college entrance exams during the COVID-19 pandemic—schools like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and MIT—are reinstating the practice.

While there is no single perfect measure of student ability, standardized tests have proven to offer educators valuable insight into prospective undergrads’ academic potential. Officials at Hopkins even admitted as much when announcing their return to using the SAT and ACT.

But service academies such as the U.S. Naval Academy, West Point, Air Force Academy, and Coast Guard Academy should go one step further and implement the Classical Learning Test (CLT).

While the SAT and ACT measure reading and math skills, the CLT gauges student critical thinking ability and knowledge by incorporating texts from classical works of literature and history into the reading comprehension sections. The test also incorporates challenging multi-step math word problems in the math section.

CLT’s founder explains that teachers should use the best reading materials and methods available for assessments. Instead of reading samples that are uninspiring and quickly forgotten, why not use selections from great thinkers—from Plato to former U.S. presidents—whose efforts at reasoning and understanding the world have stood the test of time?

The CLT assesses critical thinking and logic in a way the SAT and ACT do not, championing rigor and “deep comprehension of classic texts like the Constitution and Declaration of Independence,” wrote James Fishback, CEO of an investment firm and advisor to the Department of Government Efficiency, in a letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

This stands in stark contrast to tests like the SAT, which, as Fishback explains, has “ditched America’s founding documents due to their ‘extended length,’ claiming they’re ‘not an essential prerequisite for college and career readiness’.”

In his letter, Fishback urged Secretary Hegseth to alter service academies to accept the CLT for admissions. There, he noted that 120,000 students in Florida took the CLT last year but that “not a single one of them is eligible to apply to West Point or the Naval Academy,” since those schools do not yet accept the CLT.

The Defense Secretary enthusiastically responded that his team is “going to make this happen” – a change that couldn’t come soon enough.

There has never been a college entrance exam more suited to measure whether a prospective applicant would be a good fit for the service academies. And given historic recruitment and retention problems within the U.S. military, it only makes sense for the military to expand options to include entrance exams that more accurately assess students’ fitness to enroll in a service academy.

Accepting the CLT would also fit with the White House’s push to remove racial bias and discrimination from both higher education in general and service academies in particular by prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion.

DEI uses racial favoritism to give students and faculty advantages in admissions and hiring based on skin color, not effort. In contrast, admissions tests, especially the CLT, require real competencies and understanding that school grades may not.

The Naval Academy’s motto is “Ex scientia tridens,” or, “from knowledge, seapower.” Surely, an entrance exam focused on knowledge is the perfect tool to measure whether students are truly those the academy hopes to attract.

Some state lawmakers want to add the CLT to the menu of tests accepted at state colleges and universities. Lawmakers in Arkansas approved such a proposal this session, while Florida already adopted such a policy in 2023.

As more and more states do the same—and as classical education continues to grow in a rapidly expanding school choice landscape—the federal government should follow suit and adopt the CLT as an entrance exam option for its distinguished service academies.

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Jonathan Butcher is the Will Skillman Fellow in Education at The Heritage Foundation. Lindsey M. Burke, Ph.D. is the Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow and Director of the Center for Education Policy at Heritage, www.Heritage.org.

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