How many applicants are typically accepted to West Point from each state?
This fact-check may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information.
Executive summary
West Point does not publish a standard "accepted‑per‑state" breakdown in the materials provided here, so there is no authoritative, year‑to‑year table in this reporting that answers the question directly (the academy does require congressional or other nominations that produce a geographically diverse Corps) [1]. Available public statistics instead report overall applicant, admitted and enrolled totals and acceptance rates — for example one recent cycle shows roughly 1,534 offers of admission with about 1,195 cadets enrolling — but those sources do not translate those totals into a typical per‑state allotment [2] [3].
1. What West Point publishes: national totals, not state slices
West Point’s public admissions data cited in these sources focus on aggregate counts (applicants, admits, enrollees) and selective metrics such as overall acceptance rates and academic profiles rather than a breakdown by originating state, so the reporting here cannot produce an official “accepted from State X” figure [3] [4]. Sources give acceptance‑rate estimates in the low‑teens (roughly 11–14%) and year‑to‑year applicant/admitted headcounts, but none of the provided profiles or data pages include a regular per‑state admissions table [3] [5] [4].
2. Why per‑state numbers are not straightforward
Admissions to West Point are routed through a congressional nomination system and other nomination authorities, which is intended to produce candidates from across the nation rather than lock fixed seat quotas to each state; the Princeton Review notes that nominees come from “all across America” as a structural feature of the process [1]. That nomination mechanism means the geographic distribution of offers depends on how many qualified nominees each member of Congress, the vice president, and other nominating sources advance and how many of those nominees meet West Point’s standards and accept offers — factors the public aggregate statistics do not unpack [1].
3. What the public numbers do show
Recent public summaries assembled by third‑party data aggregators and college reporters show overall class and acceptance statistics: for instance, one composite report lists roughly 8,549 male and 3,771 female applicants with about 1,175 men and 359 women accepted and final enrollment of roughly 931 men and 264 women in a recent cycle — totals that produce the aggregate admitted and enrolled headcounts cited above [2]. Other independent trackers and college guides place West Point’s acceptance rate in the 11–14% band and report rising acceptance rates in some recent years, but they continue to present national figures rather than state‑level allocations [3] [4].
4. What can be inferred — and what cannot
A simple arithmetic average — dividing recent admitted totals by the 50 states (or by 52 counting DC and territories) — yields a rough hypothetical “per‑state average” on the order of a few dozen admitted cadets per state, but that is a mathematical convenience, not an authoritative allocation and is not supported by West Point data in these sources [2]. The reporting provided does not furnish the critical inputs needed to produce reliable state‑level numbers: the number of nominations submitted per district/state, variation in nominee quality, yield differences across locales, and West Point’s internal decisions about offer distribution [1].
5. Competing sources and reliability
Some service‑academy forums and private admissions consultants publish extrapolations or claim higher effective acceptance rates for “qualified” applicants, but these are interpretive analyses and not formal academy releases — the forum and private‑guidance pieces here illustrate how secondary sources can produce divergent impressions when they parse aggregate data differently [6] [7]. The only way to move beyond inference with the material provided would be access to West Point’s internal admissions breakdowns or a formal public release that disaggregates admits by applicant state, neither of which appear in the supplied reporting [1] [3].
6. Bottom line
The supplied reporting cannot produce a definitive, typical count of West Point admits by U.S. state because West Point’s publicly cited admissions materials and the third‑party summaries here report national totals and rates rather than per‑state admissions lists; estimates based on averages are possible but would be speculative and not grounded in academy data presented in these sources [2] [3] [1]. For precise, year‑by‑year per‑state figures, a reader would need either a West Point data release that disaggregates admits by state or to request the information directly from the academy’s admissions office or through a records request — steps not covered in the reporting at hand [1].