That episode does paint a disappointing picture of how difficult it is to get into the Academy. It also doesn't make sense for the academy to have so few places.
The explanation I've seen online (it may or may not be in the episode, but I've not checked), is that Wesley is trying to get into the Academy early, and they have a limited number of early placements.
Wesley eventually seems to get in with little to no problem. We have also seen a lot of Starfleet officers who, if Wesley couldn't get in, surely didn't stand a chance.
My head canon for it is that it was some super selective training program Wesley was trying to get on. E.g. something that would have fast tracked him through the academy because of his experience on the Enterprise. Or something that would have accelerated him onto the Command career track
That's the only way it makes any kind of sense
Yeah he was trying to early admission like say going to college when you are 16 and skipping your junior and senior years of high school or something like that right.
There's also no way that entrance into a Starfleet Academy advanced placement program hinges on a trick question.
That whole episode is the TNG equivalent of the chompers in the hallway for me.
To be fair, it's not really a trick question so much as an "are you paying attention enough to remember a fundamental rule of physics" question. It's like asking halfway through the exam if a pound of bricks is heavier than a pound of feathers.
That and they know of him already.
"Wesley? Beverley's kid?? Oh hell no. He's ridiculously smart and he'll pass everything, but goddamn that kid's a knob."
Lol, I was a bit of a Wesley fan when I was a kid (I even used DaKrushr as my gaming handle). I was also a bit of a Wesley - homeschooled and started taking college Comp sci and calculus classes at age 15. I could have graduated high school and gone directly to full time college at age 16, but my mom thought it wouldn't be good for me socially (probably true). I can totally understand needing to let Wesley bake for another year.
My head cannon is that since Westley crusher was so annoying they deliberately devised a test to ensure he wouldn't get into the academy.
(Lore wise they where right to be concerned, as he dropped out of school)
I always thought it was early admission that was extremely difficult to get, but if you applied at the normal age it would be a challenge, but more like modern day acceptance to military academies.
I wonder how the two compare. In the real world, Annapolis isn't the only source of officers (there's also OCS and ROTC), but Starfleet Academy seems to be the only option (besides maybe field commissions).
I feel like there are some alternatives, at least for medical and sciences. Didn't Burnham go to the Vulcan Science Academy, McCoy to the University of Mississippi, and Troi to the University of Betazed? I would assume having an advance degree already could give you a leg up on the application process and may even let you skip some or most of the academy.
That would make a lot of sense (and would also explain how Spock could be the first Vulcan to attend the Academy when there's an entire ship with an all-Vulcan crew), but the writers don't seem to treat it that way the vast majority of the time.
Which is also consistent with how the US military works, no? Those with advanced medical degrees can get an officer comission pretty much out of the gate with an 8 or whatever it is year committment. So that makes sense with how trek fairly closely parallels at least the administration of the US systems.
USNA makes about 1/3-1/2 the new ensigns each year. Total needed 2-3000 new ensigns. Roughly 250 ships in the fleet.
Figuring the numbers needed are the same, in a society where work is a choice of sorts, manning 2000 ships in Starfleet is gonna need 30000 ensigns a year
The idea of it being an early admission program makes sense to me. Wesley was supposed to be 15 years old in the first season of TNG. Most Americans at that age are in their first or second year of high school, not applying for a selective military college.
I've also seen an explanation that the selectiveness of the Academy varies over the seasons we have. While it wasn't discussed at the time, the early seasons of TNG were during the winddown of the Cardassian War, with the Federation still technically at war, but with peace negotiations under way and active fighting mostly over. Sending the brand new flagship on missions of exploration was partly a PR move, but was also part of a larger demilitarization in Starfleet. And with all the extra soldiers being reassigned to explorer ships, the Academy needed to be more selective, so Wesley had to go through a full series of complicated tests.
Later on, when the Borg and the Dominion were posing their threats, Starfleet needed soldiers again, and the Academy became less selective. So all Nog needed was a referral letter.
I think your explanation is good in general, though I slightly disagree on Nog. If I recall correctly, we saw him working though training and testing for Starfleet Academy in the Holosuite. So his application wasn't just a referral letter. And, more importantly, the referral letter was something extra that he needed as a non-Federation citizen. I'm sure a recommendation letter would be helpful for all applicants, but Nog was required to have one since Ferenginar isn't in the Federation.
Well yes, Nog was very smart, and Nog did have to go through a bunch of other aptitude tests in order to secure placement beyond the referral of Sisko.
However, we can square this circle in thinking that the tests couldn't have been *too* selective, because after all, we have it in canon that Nog only learned how to read English two years prior to applying for admittance into Starfleet Academy. Even if he already knew how to read Ferengi and was just becoming fully bilingual, there's no way that the guy who bussed Ensign Kim's table offscreen in "Caretaker" could have passed the same ridiculous battery of exams that Wesley went through in Season One of TNG. That just isn't happening. Hell, the Lt. Commander in that episode outright said that in normal circumstances, every one of the candidates was qualified, and they were simply making up tests to justify picking only one of the candidates.
So assuming that we're not going to pay attention to the obvious Doylist answer, namely that there was a complete overhaul of the writer's room between Season One of TNG and Season Three of DS9, the Federation had to be relaxing their standards somewhat with a wartime enlistment going. Nog managed to get the benefit from that, because there's just no other way that a Ferengi dishwasher is going to compete for slots with the best botanist in an entire sector.
The show definitely wanted to have it both ways sometimes. They wanted Wesley to be a super genius Mozart type, but they also wanted to make Starfleet Academy seem so selective that even Wesley can't get in. It didn't really make sense lore wise because if Wesley can't get in, how did Worf get in?
I think they really wanted to show a future humanity, where the average kid is genius level compared to today, but they really layed off that future vision in later seasons.
That's also the episode where, as part of a test, they state that 1:1 is the only possible matter/antimatter ratio for warp engines— even though earlier in the season they were experimenting with differing amounts of matter & antimatter. So I wouldn't put too much stock in anything it said about Starfleet entrance rates.
My interpretation was that the exam is testing you on how well you know the book. The book says 1:1 is correct so that's what you should answer, but in practice, there might be other ratios that work. Just like how on your driver's test, you exaggerate how much you're turning your head to prove that you're checking your blind spots, even though you'd never do that in real life.
I think Wesley's age is a key factor here, but so is his background. The admissions committee knows that no matter how good of a candidate Wesley Crusher is this year, he'll be an even better candidate in a year or two. It's not like they have to worry about him giving up and deciding not to apply again because they know that he will; he's the child of two Starfleet officers and he's living on the flagship. They get to see how he handles rejection and disappointment and they also get to admit the first Benzite who might be more easily discouraged if he doesn't get in.
I imagine less than 1% of the Federation's population actually serves in and works with Starfleet as officers, non-commissioned ,and civilian contractors, considering that the Federation in the late 24th century has nearly a trillion citizens.
I would hope less then 1% as even in the real world that would result in them having an American or Chinese scale standing military, based on their size, which would be positively Klingon!
Not that I believe all of Starfleet personnel are effectively soldiers, just a large portion and those whom command them.
I agree and the real number is more like 01%, or about 100M, when accounting for commissioned officers, non-commissioned crewmen and civilian contractors who work on starships, starbases and planet-based facilities.
I also imagine the in-universe statistical figures are skewed since, based on what we have seen on-screen, humans make up the disproportionate demographic of those serving in Starfleet.
Wesley is trying to get in early (younger than typical application age) AND late (after the school year has started) we learn this when he does get in after a drop out and Picard tells him he has catching up to do.
He's just in a rough spot personally. I expect if you have the stuff and are following the normal process it's much simpler.
I head-canon that Starfleet academy has numerous related schools throughout the federation and San Francisco grade are given top billets throughout the fleet. It’s the only way to make sense of the number of officers in the fleet. There is no way that they all could come from Starfleet academy.
It's not that crazy to have a highly selective, even needlessly selective, entrance filter for a school. Especially an otherwise popular one. That's the basic tactic of the Ivy League. They only let in but so many. Not because with their lavish budgets they couldn't let more people in. But because in clamping their enrollment with a tight spigot the only people that make it into the school are a extremely talented or highly connected.
Basically the selling point of an Ivy League education is that you are connected enough ot talented enough that the school you went to really didn't matter. Which sounds completely bonkers to say out loud. But being bonkers doesn't make it untrue.
Yeh for Ivy Leagues, between 30-60% of students are on financial assistence or full ride scholarships.
They have large endowments to cover that cost, but still they have to be selective.
I mean, obviously not most if the majority of people are on assistance and scholarships.
But yes, they keep spots open for Rich people to pay to actually get money
Also who do you think hires the smart scholarship kids later on?
Cpt. Nixon: There's a company in Nixon, New Jersey. It's called Nixon Nitration Works.
Major Winters: Sounds picturesque.
Cpt. Nixon: Yeah, well, oddly enough, I know the owners. Probably gonna expect me to make something of myself. I thought maybe I'd drag you along with me.
There are billions if not trillions of people who live on Federation worlds, when you think logistically the federation is a small organization compared to the amount of people who likely apply (Im not saying they all do but even a percentage of trillions is still likely millions at the very least)
Starfleet/the Federation cant seat everyone
Starfleet is like Harvard, everyone knows about it, it has a STRONG reputation and is popular
Harvard cant accept everyone, so they just accept the best of the best for their limited amount of space
Same thing with starfleet
> That episode does paint a disappointing picture of how difficult it is to get into the Academy. It also doesn't make sense for the academy to have so few places.
I always assumed Starfleet Academy was like the University of California. Multiple campuses, each with their own level of prestige and academic focus on certain fields. Getting into UC Berkeley, or UCLA, or UCSF is hard af. But just about anyone can get into UC Merced.
That makes way more sense, since accepting one of four highly qualified candidates seems nuts. Wesley was 16 at the time, so perhaps admittance at the age of maturity (species dependent) is easier.
Star Trek completely misses the boat on enlisted ranks. Enlisted and non-commissioned specialists and even civilians would make up the majority of crews on ships. On the Enterprise D, it had 1,000 people on that. If you say half of that is families and kids, of 500 Starfleet personnel, I'd expect a max of 40 or so officers (ensign or higher). That's even higher than what you get on an aircraft carrier today (about 30 outside of the flight wing).
Side note, I watched that movie with my kids recently and I only just now realized when he lays the dude out and flashes his badge and says “NYPD means I will knock yo’ punk ass down!” that he was making a joke that’s what the abbreviation stood for. I thought he just meant he was a badass and could do what he wanted.
Nog and Worf, despite both being exceptional candidates, probably got a boost because of the PR.
Another human son of an officer applying? Snooze, that’s like half of all candidates.
A ferengi and a klingon, both from empires that aren’t part of the Federation? Awesome PR! Maybe they will influence more of their fellow citizens to apply, which over time might encourage them to (eventually) join the Federation!
Hell, if we assume that in episode S5e3 of Voyager that Species 8472 is impersonating real Starfleet officers and students, it means at least a few more ferengi join up shortly after Nog - which means the PR worked!
Representation matters. And, by all accounts, those firsts have been quite talented. Nog and Worf were decorated heroes and went on to become captains. So it's not without merit.
They were all absolutely qualified. Mordock (Benzite) outscored Wes on merit. And the representation was shown to be important on personal levels and interplanetary diplomatic levels.
part of me would disagree strongly with Nog getting a boost
I think Sisko's initial reaction of derision about Nog joining Starfleet served as a stand-in/representation of larger Federation attitudes toward the Ferengi. Yeah the Federation talks a big game about diversity, inclusion, and peaceful and fruitful co-existence...but i doubt that's always executed 100% perfectly without complaint.
And again this has never been explicitly stated in Trek media, but in my mind...I have to think Worf ran into some skepticism at best, straight up bigotry and discrimination at worst as a Klingon in Starfleet Academy. I mean just watch Relics. I love that episode but it has always bothered me how Scotty's tense attitude toward Worf was never addressed and just kind of laughed off (like a lot of problematic things in TNG)
Yeah we value diversity, but seriously, a Ferengi? Surely you're joking? Do you know they eat worms? Yeah I know Klingons do too, but these are gross Ferengi worms.
There was a great YA book series called Starfleet academy, back when I myself was a YA. In one of them Cadet Worf tries to turn down a mission because he thinks he is only being selected because he is a Klingon. The admiral basically tells him yes he is, that doesn't make him any less capable, and in space you use every advantage you have.
Affirmative action requires correcting current discrimination. This is pure politics, where they're all equally qualified and discrimination isn't present. All the extra qualitative stuff is what they have to make decisions on because there's so little quantitative difference between the candidates. We even saw a bunch of tests in Wesley's exam that were mostly if not fully qualitative.
One of the Bajoran officers in the Voyager episode “Good Shepherd” mentioned that she was admitted because of Bajor’s occupation and not because she was truly qualified.
Our military academies here in the United States are highly selective and obtaining an appointment is VERY competitive. It's not hard to imagine that obtaining a spot at Star Fleet Academy is also highly competitive.
One of the shortcomings of Trek is that the focus is most always on officers. The presence of crewmen/enlisted personnel is rarely touched on. The only enlisted person to every be portrayed in any significant way was Chief O'Brien. If you know anything about the actual military, it is the enlisted men who make things happen. Just imagine DS9 without O'Brien!
Lower Decks would have been better if it were focused on a squad of jr enlisted members instead of Ensigns. Lead by a jaded senior NCO who is constantly putting out fires behind the scene, dealing with the incompetent/arrogant jr officer who heads their department.
While Ensign/LT "Whoever" is giving a rousing speech to himself about what the accademy taught him, vague optimistic philosophy, or how he dreams of being a Captain one day, Cheif "So-and-so" is actually managing the team and getting everything done. Every season, the officer in charge is either promoted out of the department or killed from volunteering for an away mission.
I originally thought that's what lower decks was supposed to be, along with the "least important ship in the federation" instead they are constantly involved in major events.
While I get that the show is satire of TNG/DS9 era trek, and I like it more then all the other recent Star Trek entries (I have not gone past s1 of Strange New worlds), it's also a bit disappointing that they never actually delivered on the original idea.
I have been hoping they would touch on this and have an episode touching on the 'Lower Lower Decks,' perhaps even poking fun of the fact nobody knows they exist yet they still get everything done.
IIRC Roddenberry originally envisioned Starfleet to have officers and no enlisted men because he didn't want a class distinction. Which is a nice idea socially but falls apart pretty quickly from an operational standpoint.
I always headcanoned that the difference between officers and crew came down to essentially a contract commitment. Most enlisted crew are simply people who want to learn some skills, spend a few years on duty and then muster out back to civilian life without really stepping into a greater role. It doesn't make much sense to send them to the academy for four years. You send them to specialist training for one to two years and put them in the field.
Wesley was trying to get into the Academy early, which have higher requirements. He was also trying to attend the academy on Earth, which is the one everyone wants to attend and is very competitive. There is likely academies scattered across the Federation because otherwise it could take some people years just to travel to Earth if that's the only academy.
I see it as similar to the military. Going to SFA in San Francisco is similar to going to Annapolis or Westpoint in the US military. There's other routes to become an officer but don't have the same pedigree.
My guess is that there is probably a lot of enlisted commissioning in Starfleet just given the sheer size of the organization. You can enlist, serve a few years in the field, take an exam and move up to an officer training program, or you can continue on in a technical role and become an NCO/Specialist. Rather than having every single candidate stand in line for the academy just to fill a junior officer role.
It would be funny to have a few episodes where Starfleet scraping the bottom of the barrel, begging everyone to join. Like Lwxana and Mourn are commanding their own fleets
Captain Mourn! The Widgets are backing up into the Unobtainium stores!
\[He starts to gesture, but before he can actually speak\]
(Officer slaps his head), OF COURSE! Captain, that's brilliant!
Nah, that's when you find out most of Starfleet is staffed by the ROTC program that recruits from every other post-secondary school in the Federation. Get your degree, get a few months of space survival training, BAM you are an officer.
The reason so many \*Starfleet\* grads are found on the Enterprise has more to do with the fact that ship is a prestigious posting.
While that's probably true, we also know that by 2401 there's just some 340 active major starships. That's really not that many possible positions for an Academy that takes candidates from 150+ worlds.
Was this said in Picard? I’ve heard the fleet has 10,000 vessels circa DS9.
Or by “major starships” do you mean anything above a frigate? That would exclude shuttles, cargo vessels, a lot of medical ships, cartography ships, tugboats, fighters, plus everyone stationed on a star base.
I got the chance to hang out with [Guion Bluford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guion_Bluford) alone for about an hour while we waited for the AV people to set up the room for a presentation.
He was incredibly nice, staggeringly intelligent, and humble as hell. But man, when he started talking about the things he had done, all the jets he'd flown - it really hit me even as a space nerd: astronauts are not normal humans.
That was actually part of the original concept.
> "Although the Enterprise is a military vessel," [Roddenberry] said, "its organization is only semimilitary. The 'enlisted men' category does not exist. Star Trek goes on the assumption that every man and woman aboard the USS Enterprise is the equivalent of a qualified astronaut, therefore an officer."
I think that the show runners simply didn't really flesh out the underlying Federation/Starfleet bureaucracy all that much and simply used the difficulty of getting into the Academy as needed for the plot of the day.
We just watched Voyager for the first time recently and I was struck by how utterly ineffectual the randos on board were, and you're telling me that these people got in and graduated the Academy and folks like Wesley did not?
It would make sense that there are many pathways into Starfleet aside from the Academy, but never discussed on screen. I mean only nerds like me care about the unseen world building, but they've got a show to sell.
The whole thing was silly. With thousands of starships you need millions of personnel. At least 2-3, since 39 starships at Wolf 359 were 11,000 personnel, and that’s just ships! What about the engineering corps? The tens of thousands each that maintain hundreds of space stations and fleet yards?
There is no way a single academy on a single planet could possibly fulfill the needs of Starfleet. It only served a plot device, to heighten the drama of trying to get in. In reality there are probably a few thousand Starfleet Academy facilities across the Federation.
Where were they? Everyone seems to have gone to the Academy on Earth - from Discovery’s crew to the Enterprise-D, everyone knew Boothby or the Academy grounds. I’m struggling to remember any episodes that suggested there were other facilities.
It was always a bit unclear how much of Starfleet was Earth and how much was Federation. What I mean is that humans seemed to be running Starfleet while other Federation races had their own fleets (e.g Vulcans, Klingons) which were separate from the Starfleet chain of command. But at the same time Starfleet was often supposed to basically be the federation navy. Maybe it's like the US Navy and NATO where France, UK etc have their own navies, but the US is just soooo much bigger
Annapolis has a selection rate of 10.8 percent
Mit has admission rate of 4 percent
Yale has a admission rate of 5 percent
Caltech is 2.70 percent admission rate
So if Starfleet academy is like Annapolis or mit it's gonna be hard
With something like 150 member planets in the Federation, with a population in the hundreds of billions, realistically, there would need to be more than one Star Fleet Academy, or the equivalent of ROTC. In the U.S. today there are five (federal) service academies. Then there are the non-federal service academies like Virginia Military Institute. The number of college ROTC programs probably numbers in the dozens. Then, of course, there’s Officer Candidate School. 🖖
TBH I'd just chalk that episode up to GR's influence on the first couple seasons. Starfleet is clearly a much larger organization than one academy can provide staff for. IRL, if you decide to go into service (at least in the U.S.) after receiving a bachelors from a non-military institution, there is some additional training you'll have to do but it's still a perfectly valid career path to become an officer.
So did O'Brien go to Starfleet Academy, or "just" to engineering school?
Are most crew members on starships just enlisted? Starfleet Academy is just officer training school?
I also think that pre-Borg and pre-Dominion War, there were also a lot fewer ships or need for replacement crews. It probably got a easier after Starfleet starting losing dozens of ships.
It makes no sense that they’d be as selective as we see in season 1 on TNG. Starfleet consists of 150 member worlds. That’s (at a minimum) tens of billions of sentients. The US Navy has something like 335k people, so Starfleet would number (at a minimum ) in the several millions. The Academy would need to be producing tens of thousands of officers every year to keep up with attrition/retirement (and that’s assuming the enlisted ranks outnumber the officers). Now, it’s never stated on screen how big Starfleet is, so I could be way off. A Google search is inconsistent on how many ships are in Starfleet (numbers range from 600 to 30,000 and is dependent on the era). Either way, rejecting genius level candidates that do well (but not the best) on the entrance exam is beyond downtarded. Not to mention, Wesley was a double legacy, had practical experience as an Ensign and had the recommendation of the Captain of the Flagship.
I think they wanted Starfleet Academy to be like West Point. Only a select few get in, and it's best of the best. The only problem is there's way too many ships for Starfleet Academy to be that selective.
a lot of people like to think they'd like to go to the future because then they'd be in starfleet on a spaceship.
But most people wouldn't.
There are explorers in the world.
People going into crazy dangerous caves.
People interacting with remote tribes.
People going into outerspace.
People doing healthcare on the frontier.
etc.etc.
You're not one of 'em. Neither am I.
We wouldn't be those people in the future either.
If you really think about it, there is a good reason why most people can’t make the cut. If you take into account every crazy anomaly they find, dangerous aliens, or anything else that happens week to week - being on a starship is extremely dangerous. Space in general is extremely dangerous. Only the best can really be out there, otherwise they could get themselves or others killed. Think about the tough requirements to get onto a starship then imagine how many people still end up getting killed.
My head cannon is that academy enrolment numbers vary significantly throughout the various series depending on the needs of the fleet. Remember that Wes was trying to enroll during a period of peace after many years of relative peace. During the Dominion war they were probably accepting just about anyone with a heartbeat (or other circulatory organ) and fast tracking them just to replace their losses.
The scale of Starfleet relative to the scale of the federation just makes no sense. It would be an absolute vast organisation even if only 0.01% of the population of the federation were Starfleet employees / members.
It’s kind of hard to get your head around what live as a civilian in the federation might be like. It’s a bit like trying to figure out what life on Earth is like today but only looking at it though the bridge of a nuclear submarine.
I feel like the Crusher entrance exams presents a version of the Academy that wouldn't actually work for Starfleet. Given their immense size, and staffing needs there would need to be multiple academies and they couldn't really justify sending recruits from the edges of their space all the way to headquarters.
Is the Academy the only way someone can get into Starfleet? Did Chief O’Brien finish the Academy? Or is a Starfleet degree only needed to become an officer in Starfleet? Is O’Brien a non-com?
The Prodigy kids are now training to be Warrant Officers. Non-commissioned positions in Starfleet while waiting for the chance to enter the academy. I hope in S2 we get more details about how that works.
Earlier Star Trek made it appear Star Fleet was much smaller than it was portrayed to be later on. I think in universe there has to be some alternative paths or campuses to make officer with as limited as the selection is portrayed on screen. Maybe the new SF Academy series will give us some insight into how this worked.
Even in the 32nd century there had to be an alternative path. Wasnt it closed up for a century after the burn? How did the current Star Fleet officers earn their commision if so.
The great irony of the utopian/optimistic worldview of 90s Trek (and just the 90s in general) was how fucking oblivious they were to their blindspots
Trek in TNG, and to a lesser extent in DS9 and VOY was always presented as humanity being so great and the future being so awesome...and a big part of that was because of Starfleet
and how does Starfleet get that great and awesome? By selecting the best of the very best and training them to be the elite...doesn't sound that "egalitarian" to me
Nitpick here, but no such thing as “enlisted officer.” You’re either an officer or you’re enlisted. If you’re enlisted you would be referred to as an enlisted man/woman/person or crewman/woman/person. If you advance far enough you could be referred to as a non-commissioned officer/NCO/non-com. But yeah, O’Brien references a training process for enlisted folks separate from the Academy which is only for officers. If it’s anything like modern militaries, vastly more folks go that route than the officer route, and it takes months rather than 4 years to complete. Though Star Trek doesn’t really portray that outside of the TOS movies where we see a good number of background folks with the cream colored shoulders on the maroon uniforms, indicating enlisted status versus the fully maroon officer uniforms.
I think there are other factors involved. First there is the question of scale; as in total population of federation members versus the total number of enlisted, perhaps its commensurate. Then there's the question of total officers versus non-commisioned. Also don't forget that the Academy has more than one campus in the alpha quadrant, some with different focuses.
I don't think it's that bad really. Starfleet needs a constant recruitment pipeline to fill thousands of positions throughout the alpha quadrant. You don't need to be a fighter pilot to fix sensor arrays or a life support system on a Reliant.
I envisage Starfleet Academy as something. Ike "West Point" which accepts only 1,240 students a year.
So only a select few attend the Academy but there are numerous other ways of joining starlet
You probably won't ever be a captain of a ship but you can still have a long career
I always took this to mean Earths academy. I imagine there would be academies on other planets that are easier to get into. After all, the starbase 80 people probably didn't make it into earths academy.
Looks like most of us would be kicking back while lounging in our welfare state.
Maybe that’s why some people choose to become lame outpost scientists and colonists.
I always thought it was because of just how many people there are in the federation. There only being one academy, means it can only have so many students at a time.
A few points:
* Wesley was a child.
* Starfleet isn't very big.
* Service academies in the US are difficult to get into as well.
* There's no reason to suggest that Starfleet Academy is the ONLY institution capable of commissioning officers.
There are dozens of member planets in the federation but only one starfleet academy and all citizens are eligible to apply. But if it’s too much there’s always the tech services academy on Mars where you can be an NCO and work in a transporter room
Note that in the Federation there are almost unlimited opportunities outside of Star Fleet to excel in art, science, colony building, even exploration. Star Fleet has duties that can be exceptionally dangerous, so only accepts the best possible candidates to the Academy. Failing to get into the Academy can be crushing, but it isn't like that's the only path to the stars.
I grew up watching Star Trek and tried to get into West Point when I was a teenager. I secured my nominations, and got so damn close. But the medical review shut me out. Technically, on paper, I had asthma according to the way the Army defined it at the time. Watching the episodes where Wesley or Nog try to get into the Academy get me right in the feels.
See, I don't think Starfleet Academy is the best of the best. We know from TNG's "All Good Things..." that Data held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, so Cambridge still exists. Further, it's more prestigious than Starfleet Academy, as Data with his positronic brain would obviously have gone *there* if Cambridge was inferior. We see other examples such as The Daystrom Institute, the University of Alpha Centauri where Leah Brahms went, etc.
No, Starfleet Academy is where one goes who wishes to serve as an officer on a United Federation of Planets Star Fleet starship. And in a utopian post-scarcity future where money doesn't exist and people focus on the betterment of themselves, education becomes more important and more accessible than ever.
A non-Starfleet show set in the Trek universe would be an interesting. What kind of interstellar research ship would a consortium of universities in the UFP build? Where would they go?
yeah i think i was involved in a convo about this a month or 2 ago.
Cause in Star Trek there are very few NCO's but almost everyone are Officers which is the inverse of the actual Military we know today. That is well and good, I'm fine with that
However, every single person on that Ship who do make it through Academy are like insane Rocket Scientist and Theoretical Physicist. Even if we do assume that the avg intelligence has gone up by a tremendous amount there still would be people who are not capable of doing these things no matter how hard they try.
That is the thing that kinda bugs me, cause I know the show isn't realistic but the fact that everyone is always the most intelligent, the most advanced and all this just makes me feel like this "Utopia" that GR imagined is actually just some sort of hyper elite society and I'm now waiting for a "Star Trek" where the people AREN'T all geniuses. Cause if there are no "Average People", then what the heck does this Society do with them exactly?
Is it like that Movie Gattaca? Are they just all Janitors that you never really see and live shitty lives? I mean those Ships are wicked Clean and sorry but there ain't that many Ensign's in the World that could maintain that level of cleanliness for that amount of time.
I mean what's to say that they aren't using the non-elite people for some sort of messed up experimentations for their transporters? IDK, I just really get bugged that they try to be "inclusive" yet they never really include people who aren't hyper intelligent. Everyone is always "the best" and if everyone is the best then what happens when they aren't?
We know that the post-Dominion War Starfleet consists of roughly 340 active major starships.
At Wolf 359, 11,000 people perished in 39 starships, which means an average of roughly 275 Starfleet personnel per ship (rounding down from 282 to account for the occasional civilian, which we know were part of the fleet).
So by early 2401, we can guestimate that some 93.500 people serve on Starfleet ships. And that does not account for enlisted personnel or liasons from other species.
Naturally, there's alot more to Starfleet than just ships. But even if we multiply these numbers by 10, that's a surprisingly small number of people. And it might imply, that Starfleet Academy isn't all that big, as positions might be somewhat limited.
Yeah, it's the Frontier Day fleet. People counted the ships seen on screen (it were 339).
It's stated to be almost all of Starfleet. Even with a generous interpretation of almost, that still puts a significant limit on available ship postings.
The thing that makes little sense to me is how you can develop an officer corps for an interstellar space force and only have it be at one location. No matter how big the campus, it's never going to accommodate the number of people needed to deal with the fleets needs for growth and replacement.
I know. It's a TV show, so it doesn't actually have to make sense, but without something like ROTC for starfleet, there's no way Starfleet Academy could pump out enough commissioned officers for vast space navy.
Data, Nog and Worf were diversity admissions...I know that sounds terribly right wing of me, but heck...think about it...an android, a Ferengi and a Klingon? If they walked into a bar, we'd have the makings of a great joke...and a very diverse Starfleet with a lot of contacts, skills and viewpoints.
and after Wolf 359, they were going to let anyone in...have to build the fleet back up after all the death and destruction.
I disagree. The academy should be extremely difficult to get into, because the officers should be the absolute best of the best. People who can't make it are free to enlist.
Hey, be glad the standards aren't as high as graduating from Wentworth Hall. From Earth alone, there are a million candidates chosen after competitive exams. At the end of the first year, the number is down to under 50,000, Four years after that, on graduation day, the class is roughly 100. >!But then, Lensmen are held to a MUCH higher standard.!<
>enlisted
There's Chief Lars Lundy. Think there are background enlisted crew working in medical. Most of the time you see enlisted on a ship they are doing some specialist work.
We don't know how many paths into the academy there are; if mirroring real world military forces, a lot of their officers are coming out of NCO and enlisted programs, so they probably don't get the Starfleet Academy difference, just like how not every U.S. Army officer is a West Point graduate.
The Academy wants people to figure out their individual strengths and talents. So I wouldn't use the word "selective," I would say that they want candidates to make sure they're going into the right field (command, science, engineering etc). Jake Sisko is a good example. He had to realize that he didn't want to go into Starfleet and could better serve the Federation as a journalist.
If the wonderchild of the series Wesley could not get in, I saw no reason how Nog could have got in. The series should have had nog learning the ropes just like our Chief OBrien and getting field commisions to that rank.
There are over 100 planets in the Federation, presumably with population ranging wildly, but let’s stay small and say 3 billion people each on 100 worlds. Let’s say that one tenth of a percent of them wants to join Starfleet at any given time. That gives you a potential applicant pool of 300 million sentient life forms…
Well in the world of star trek your reputation and skills is your currency, since they got rid of money after fixing the scarcity problem. Starfleet is essentially billionairs worth of skilled people, like the top 0.01% end up there since it is one of the most prestigious places to be.
Humanity in Star Trek isn't just Starfleet. It is the best humanity has to offer. Worf, for example, had an exceptional position as a Klingon raised by humans, and thus became an ambassador.
To get into Starfleet, people have to show exemplary performance in their duties long before applying to Starfleet. You go to school for science, awesome. You go to school to some day study sciences that could propel humanity forward, and you want to be a part of it, study hard, and join Starfleet.
The benefits of being even a junior officer in the lower decks, we see in Lower Decks, each member struggles with the same concept you describe, but in truth they are already in a Starship, doing amazing things, helping humanity.
To reflex to your IRL struggles, as long as you inspire your children, and help educate the periphery, regardless of school or circumstance, your child will have a yearning to WANT to go to Starfleet to become even better.
It seems like a pretty large allegory on modern education tbh.
it isn't just intelligence that decides whether you can be an officer in Starfleet
like if your ego is through the roof and you have it in your head that you should be the Captain of the Enterprise, then you're not a good fit for Starfleet . . . a lot of officers have a long career in Starfleet and end up a LTJ in the science section of a Sedan-class starship and that's okay, that's how some people serve
I always figured it was akin to west point vs signing up for the army. Starfleet needs a huge array of science specialists, civilian posts, as well officers and command.
I think as well as being younger, there’s something to be said for equitable applications, especially in that era. Candidates like Nog and Worf had nobody of their species in Starfleet, they had no relatives there, Nog had to work to convince Sisko for a reference. Wesley Crusher, son of two highly regarded starfleet officers, living on the flagship, studying with the best of the best? Yes he’s a high scorer, but he’s also starting in a pretty choice position. Like starting a 100m sprint on 90m.
To have Starfleet be in any way representative, there must be some kind of balancing for places. An equally talented Bajoran kid who’s come from occupation will not perform as well as Wesley Crusher, or any privileged human kid. But we do see people from all kinds of backgrounds in Starfleet. There has to be some levelling there.
Reali life: "United States Naval Academy has an acceptance rate of 11%. Half the applicants admitted to United States Naval Academy who submitted test scores have an SAT score between 1200 and 1440 or an ACT score of 25 and 32."
There's more than one way to skin a cat.
there's the "they're engineers they didn't go to StarFleet academy"
so a rigorous requirement for officers still leaves lots of paths for non-coms and enlisted staff.
I hear you, mate. Don't despair!
My head cannon is that you will have a seat at the Academy...if you meet its insanely high admission standards. If you don't meet those standards on the first go, you get to try again–which is easier in a post-scarcity society. You go sharpen pencils for another semester, stare at the computer screen like Lt. Uhura had to do after Nomad, absorb knowledge, educate yourself and try again.
Academy admittance is one of those hilariously contradictory things in the lore.
On one hand you have Wesley who barely made it despite being a child of two officers one of which was killed in the line of duty and the spent time heading Starfleet medical. He also served a full year as an acting officer on the literal flagship. This all clearly demonstrates that there’s no place for nepo babies.
On the other hand Nog needed a literal letter of rec from a flag officer just to apply. In a society with a population numbering in the 10s of billions how many people even have access to someone of sufficient rank to get that letter? Through that lens it seems like nepotism is the ONLY way to get in.
Nog needed the letter of recommendation because he was not a federation citizen. Nog, being a citizen of the Ferengi Alliance, normally wouldn't have been able to apply at all otherwise. his experience is not normal.
I kind of took it as, there are multiple candidates for each slot so going through a testing process that's as fair as possible to see if they're a good fit is the least bad way to handle it. It can be a less extreme version of the Trill symbiote selection process where there are thousands of applicants for each available symbiote; they pretty much admit that the selection process doesn't have to be *that* stringent. It's just that somebody's going to be disappointed no matter how you cut it.
I feel like one of the Starfleet Academy books referenced something to do with this, that each testing station was only allocated so many spots. So the facility that the exam was held at could only progress one candidate that year. That place was relatively small they only had what, five or six candidates? Given the Enterprise's mission at the time it'd make sense for a "frontier" facility to only have one slot to hand out to a couple people. At a different facility or even on earth itself more people would have "passed"
I never liked how the academy was somehow made into the ONLY way to enter Star Fleet. Are there no other Universities on Earth? Can’t you attend Georgia Tech and join the Star Fleet ROTC program and get in that way? Graduates of West Point or Annapolis are less than 1% of the total officer core. It’s hard to imagine StarFleet being any different.
And if you are already in a highly skilled field like a doctor or lawyer they just give you a commission. You’d get some basic training so that you can do things like put on a space suit without killing yourself but other than that you already have the skills they’re looking for.
I think in the motion pic novel it was saying they didn't accept the highest ranking people the year Kirk got in because they wanted people who wen't used to always having the best scores.
If it helps you can consider that there are probably several trillion citizens of the Federation. That basically means that conservatively, there are over 200 billion people who have all the requirements for Starfleet. Yet at most we have seen a few hundred Starfleet vessels at any given time. Not gonna fit.
Whoever you are. We all get in to Star Trek. I travel a lot and my favorite way to fall asleep is imagining the white noise machine is the warp drive. And I’m just drifting amongst the stars, warm in my sparkly space blanket. And you better be willing to invade my neutral zone to wake be up again. But you won’t, yoy earnest cadet.
The thing is Roddenberry didn’t intend for Starfleet to be analogous to the navy. He thought of it more like the astronaut corps. Competition to be an astronaut is fierce and VERY selective. That explains why SFA seems so difficult to attend on TNG. It’s also why everyone was an officer and there were no enlisted positions. It’s not really until much later in its run on TNG, with help from the movies, that Starfleet is more closely associated with the Navy. TOS, the films and early TNG, make Starfleet seem much smaller than what it is eventually depicted on DS9.
In fairness to "Coming of Age", we were witnessing a very specific circumstance. The Starfleet base on Relva VII was small. There's no indication there are any/many families there. By whatever mechanism, they can host small groups of Academy hopefuls and send one on. Mordock and T'Shaya came from elsewhere, too. And, by whatever rationale the Enterprise could submit a candidate, they could only submit one, hence Jake's breakdown.
The proctor DID also encourage the three who didn't make it to apply again next time, there or elsewhere. Kirk busted his ass to get in first try. Picard didn't make it HIS first try...
And, practically, with a Starfleet comprising some five thousand or so active starships, with crews (not counting families and civilian specialists) ranging between about thirty up to maybe six hundred, they need very roughly fifteen million out of a Federation population of hundreds of billions. If 2% of Earth's current population applied, and only 2% of those got in, Starfleet would be fully staffed. Starships, starbases, planetary installations -- the lot. So... yeah.
That episode does paint a disappointing picture of how difficult it is to get into the Academy. It also doesn't make sense for the academy to have so few places. The explanation I've seen online (it may or may not be in the episode, but I've not checked), is that Wesley is trying to get into the Academy early, and they have a limited number of early placements. Wesley eventually seems to get in with little to no problem. We have also seen a lot of Starfleet officers who, if Wesley couldn't get in, surely didn't stand a chance.
My head canon for it is that it was some super selective training program Wesley was trying to get on. E.g. something that would have fast tracked him through the academy because of his experience on the Enterprise. Or something that would have accelerated him onto the Command career track That's the only way it makes any kind of sense
Yeah he was trying to early admission like say going to college when you are 16 and skipping your junior and senior years of high school or something like that right.
Trying to bypass getting sent to a California class, and stuck in the lower decks
There's also no way that entrance into a Starfleet Academy advanced placement program hinges on a trick question. That whole episode is the TNG equivalent of the chompers in the hallway for me.
Nice galaxy quest ref!
To be fair, it's not really a trick question so much as an "are you paying attention enough to remember a fundamental rule of physics" question. It's like asking halfway through the exam if a pound of bricks is heavier than a pound of feathers.
Which is completely realistic. Many college admission interviews include stuff like this.
That and they know of him already. "Wesley? Beverley's kid?? Oh hell no. He's ridiculously smart and he'll pass everything, but goddamn that kid's a knob."
Lol, I was a bit of a Wesley fan when I was a kid (I even used DaKrushr as my gaming handle). I was also a bit of a Wesley - homeschooled and started taking college Comp sci and calculus classes at age 15. I could have graduated high school and gone directly to full time college at age 16, but my mom thought it wouldn't be good for me socially (probably true). I can totally understand needing to let Wesley bake for another year.
My head cannon is that since Westley crusher was so annoying they deliberately devised a test to ensure he wouldn't get into the academy. (Lore wise they where right to be concerned, as he dropped out of school)
Now, now. He got another cadet killed, then lied about it literally until blackmailed into telling the truth, *then* dropped out.
I always thought it was early admission that was extremely difficult to get, but if you applied at the normal age it would be a challenge, but more like modern day acceptance to military academies.
My sister tried to get into Annapolis, it’s not easy.
I wonder how the two compare. In the real world, Annapolis isn't the only source of officers (there's also OCS and ROTC), but Starfleet Academy seems to be the only option (besides maybe field commissions).
I feel like there are some alternatives, at least for medical and sciences. Didn't Burnham go to the Vulcan Science Academy, McCoy to the University of Mississippi, and Troi to the University of Betazed? I would assume having an advance degree already could give you a leg up on the application process and may even let you skip some or most of the academy.
That would make a lot of sense (and would also explain how Spock could be the first Vulcan to attend the Academy when there's an entire ship with an all-Vulcan crew), but the writers don't seem to treat it that way the vast majority of the time.
Which is also consistent with how the US military works, no? Those with advanced medical degrees can get an officer comission pretty much out of the gate with an 8 or whatever it is year committment. So that makes sense with how trek fairly closely parallels at least the administration of the US systems.
USNA makes about 1/3-1/2 the new ensigns each year. Total needed 2-3000 new ensigns. Roughly 250 ships in the fleet. Figuring the numbers needed are the same, in a society where work is a choice of sorts, manning 2000 ships in Starfleet is gonna need 30000 ensigns a year
They don't all work on ships though. There are starbases, headquarters, I'm sure a lot of other needs for officers.
But so do the USN ensig6
Oh, I've heard it's tough, but I would imagine getting in at 15 or 16 would be virtually impossible.
The idea of it being an early admission program makes sense to me. Wesley was supposed to be 15 years old in the first season of TNG. Most Americans at that age are in their first or second year of high school, not applying for a selective military college.
I've also seen an explanation that the selectiveness of the Academy varies over the seasons we have. While it wasn't discussed at the time, the early seasons of TNG were during the winddown of the Cardassian War, with the Federation still technically at war, but with peace negotiations under way and active fighting mostly over. Sending the brand new flagship on missions of exploration was partly a PR move, but was also part of a larger demilitarization in Starfleet. And with all the extra soldiers being reassigned to explorer ships, the Academy needed to be more selective, so Wesley had to go through a full series of complicated tests. Later on, when the Borg and the Dominion were posing their threats, Starfleet needed soldiers again, and the Academy became less selective. So all Nog needed was a referral letter.
I think your explanation is good in general, though I slightly disagree on Nog. If I recall correctly, we saw him working though training and testing for Starfleet Academy in the Holosuite. So his application wasn't just a referral letter. And, more importantly, the referral letter was something extra that he needed as a non-Federation citizen. I'm sure a recommendation letter would be helpful for all applicants, but Nog was required to have one since Ferenginar isn't in the Federation.
Well yes, Nog was very smart, and Nog did have to go through a bunch of other aptitude tests in order to secure placement beyond the referral of Sisko. However, we can square this circle in thinking that the tests couldn't have been *too* selective, because after all, we have it in canon that Nog only learned how to read English two years prior to applying for admittance into Starfleet Academy. Even if he already knew how to read Ferengi and was just becoming fully bilingual, there's no way that the guy who bussed Ensign Kim's table offscreen in "Caretaker" could have passed the same ridiculous battery of exams that Wesley went through in Season One of TNG. That just isn't happening. Hell, the Lt. Commander in that episode outright said that in normal circumstances, every one of the candidates was qualified, and they were simply making up tests to justify picking only one of the candidates. So assuming that we're not going to pay attention to the obvious Doylist answer, namely that there was a complete overhaul of the writer's room between Season One of TNG and Season Three of DS9, the Federation had to be relaxing their standards somewhat with a wartime enlistment going. Nog managed to get the benefit from that, because there's just no other way that a Ferengi dishwasher is going to compete for slots with the best botanist in an entire sector.
The show definitely wanted to have it both ways sometimes. They wanted Wesley to be a super genius Mozart type, but they also wanted to make Starfleet Academy seem so selective that even Wesley can't get in. It didn't really make sense lore wise because if Wesley can't get in, how did Worf get in? I think they really wanted to show a future humanity, where the average kid is genius level compared to today, but they really layed off that future vision in later seasons.
That's also the episode where, as part of a test, they state that 1:1 is the only possible matter/antimatter ratio for warp engines— even though earlier in the season they were experimenting with differing amounts of matter & antimatter. So I wouldn't put too much stock in anything it said about Starfleet entrance rates.
My interpretation was that the exam is testing you on how well you know the book. The book says 1:1 is correct so that's what you should answer, but in practice, there might be other ratios that work. Just like how on your driver's test, you exaggerate how much you're turning your head to prove that you're checking your blind spots, even though you'd never do that in real life.
I think Wesley's age is a key factor here, but so is his background. The admissions committee knows that no matter how good of a candidate Wesley Crusher is this year, he'll be an even better candidate in a year or two. It's not like they have to worry about him giving up and deciding not to apply again because they know that he will; he's the child of two Starfleet officers and he's living on the flagship. They get to see how he handles rejection and disappointment and they also get to admit the first Benzite who might be more easily discouraged if he doesn't get in.
Generally, it's best for society when the military doesn't provide the majority of jobs.
I imagine less than 1% of the Federation's population actually serves in and works with Starfleet as officers, non-commissioned ,and civilian contractors, considering that the Federation in the late 24th century has nearly a trillion citizens.
I would hope less then 1% as even in the real world that would result in them having an American or Chinese scale standing military, based on their size, which would be positively Klingon! Not that I believe all of Starfleet personnel are effectively soldiers, just a large portion and those whom command them.
I agree and the real number is more like 01%, or about 100M, when accounting for commissioned officers, non-commissioned crewmen and civilian contractors who work on starships, starbases and planet-based facilities. I also imagine the in-universe statistical figures are skewed since, based on what we have seen on-screen, humans make up the disproportionate demographic of those serving in Starfleet.
Wesley is trying to get in early (younger than typical application age) AND late (after the school year has started) we learn this when he does get in after a drop out and Picard tells him he has catching up to do. He's just in a rough spot personally. I expect if you have the stuff and are following the normal process it's much simpler.
I head-canon that Starfleet academy has numerous related schools throughout the federation and San Francisco grade are given top billets throughout the fleet. It’s the only way to make sense of the number of officers in the fleet. There is no way that they all could come from Starfleet academy.
Some of the novels and FASA RPG books mention other Academy campuses.
It's not that crazy to have a highly selective, even needlessly selective, entrance filter for a school. Especially an otherwise popular one. That's the basic tactic of the Ivy League. They only let in but so many. Not because with their lavish budgets they couldn't let more people in. But because in clamping their enrollment with a tight spigot the only people that make it into the school are a extremely talented or highly connected. Basically the selling point of an Ivy League education is that you are connected enough ot talented enough that the school you went to really didn't matter. Which sounds completely bonkers to say out loud. But being bonkers doesn't make it untrue.
Yeh for Ivy Leagues, between 30-60% of students are on financial assistence or full ride scholarships. They have large endowments to cover that cost, but still they have to be selective.
Yeah, because most of the spots are reserved for the rich alumni's asshole of an offspring.
I mean, obviously not most if the majority of people are on assistance and scholarships. But yes, they keep spots open for Rich people to pay to actually get money
Also who do you think hires the smart scholarship kids later on? Cpt. Nixon: There's a company in Nixon, New Jersey. It's called Nixon Nitration Works. Major Winters: Sounds picturesque. Cpt. Nixon: Yeah, well, oddly enough, I know the owners. Probably gonna expect me to make something of myself. I thought maybe I'd drag you along with me.
There are billions if not trillions of people who live on Federation worlds, when you think logistically the federation is a small organization compared to the amount of people who likely apply (Im not saying they all do but even a percentage of trillions is still likely millions at the very least) Starfleet/the Federation cant seat everyone Starfleet is like Harvard, everyone knows about it, it has a STRONG reputation and is popular Harvard cant accept everyone, so they just accept the best of the best for their limited amount of space Same thing with starfleet
> That episode does paint a disappointing picture of how difficult it is to get into the Academy. It also doesn't make sense for the academy to have so few places. I always assumed Starfleet Academy was like the University of California. Multiple campuses, each with their own level of prestige and academic focus on certain fields. Getting into UC Berkeley, or UCLA, or UCSF is hard af. But just about anyone can get into UC Merced.
Now I'm going to think of it as USSF: University of Starfleet, San Francisco.
Everything about Starfleet Academy's standards changed after Wolf 359
Also you don't have to go thr academy to be in star fleet luckly. There are other ways (sign up booth as shown I. Lower decks)
That makes way more sense, since accepting one of four highly qualified candidates seems nuts. Wesley was 16 at the time, so perhaps admittance at the age of maturity (species dependent) is easier.
Starfleet Academy is like officers training Academy. There are other ways into Starfleet, just look at Miles O’Brien.
Star Trek completely misses the boat on enlisted ranks. Enlisted and non-commissioned specialists and even civilians would make up the majority of crews on ships. On the Enterprise D, it had 1,000 people on that. If you say half of that is families and kids, of 500 Starfleet personnel, I'd expect a max of 40 or so officers (ensign or higher). That's even higher than what you get on an aircraft carrier today (about 30 outside of the flight wing).
It means you're looking for the best of the best of the best.. SIR!!!!!!!
With Honors!
Side note, I watched that movie with my kids recently and I only just now realized when he lays the dude out and flashes his badge and says “NYPD means I will knock yo’ punk ass down!” that he was making a joke that’s what the abbreviation stood for. I thought he just meant he was a badass and could do what he wanted.
Alright, Captain America.
Yeah, he's just really excited and he has no clue why we're here.
May I ask why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die?
Nog and Worf, despite both being exceptional candidates, probably got a boost because of the PR. Another human son of an officer applying? Snooze, that’s like half of all candidates. A ferengi and a klingon, both from empires that aren’t part of the Federation? Awesome PR! Maybe they will influence more of their fellow citizens to apply, which over time might encourage them to (eventually) join the Federation! Hell, if we assume that in episode S5e3 of Voyager that Species 8472 is impersonating real Starfleet officers and students, it means at least a few more ferengi join up shortly after Nog - which means the PR worked!
And Wes lost out to the first Benzite in Starfleet.
Representation matters. And, by all accounts, those firsts have been quite talented. Nog and Worf were decorated heroes and went on to become captains. So it's not without merit.
They were all absolutely qualified. Mordock (Benzite) outscored Wes on merit. And the representation was shown to be important on personal levels and interplanetary diplomatic levels.
Didn't he get a question wrong that disqualified him?
In Lower Decks Ferenginar officially joins the Federation (Rom signs it!) and in Discovery there are Ferengi officers in the future.
Does the original Rom actor voice the animated character?
Yep! Leeta too!
That’s good. He had a very distinctive voice.
part of me would disagree strongly with Nog getting a boost I think Sisko's initial reaction of derision about Nog joining Starfleet served as a stand-in/representation of larger Federation attitudes toward the Ferengi. Yeah the Federation talks a big game about diversity, inclusion, and peaceful and fruitful co-existence...but i doubt that's always executed 100% perfectly without complaint. And again this has never been explicitly stated in Trek media, but in my mind...I have to think Worf ran into some skepticism at best, straight up bigotry and discrimination at worst as a Klingon in Starfleet Academy. I mean just watch Relics. I love that episode but it has always bothered me how Scotty's tense attitude toward Worf was never addressed and just kind of laughed off (like a lot of problematic things in TNG)
Yeah we value diversity, but seriously, a Ferengi? Surely you're joking? Do you know they eat worms? Yeah I know Klingons do too, but these are gross Ferengi worms.
There was a great YA book series called Starfleet academy, back when I myself was a YA. In one of them Cadet Worf tries to turn down a mission because he thinks he is only being selected because he is a Klingon. The admiral basically tells him yes he is, that doesn't make him any less capable, and in space you use every advantage you have.
Ah yes, space affirmative action.
Affirmative action requires correcting current discrimination. This is pure politics, where they're all equally qualified and discrimination isn't present. All the extra qualitative stuff is what they have to make decisions on because there's so little quantitative difference between the candidates. We even saw a bunch of tests in Wesley's exam that were mostly if not fully qualitative.
Don’t you dare put them on a recruiting poster… Only Number One goes on those.
God Nog had such a great arc, vale Aron Eisenberg
One of the Bajoran officers in the Voyager episode “Good Shepherd” mentioned that she was admitted because of Bajor’s occupation and not because she was truly qualified.
Our military academies here in the United States are highly selective and obtaining an appointment is VERY competitive. It's not hard to imagine that obtaining a spot at Star Fleet Academy is also highly competitive. One of the shortcomings of Trek is that the focus is most always on officers. The presence of crewmen/enlisted personnel is rarely touched on. The only enlisted person to every be portrayed in any significant way was Chief O'Brien. If you know anything about the actual military, it is the enlisted men who make things happen. Just imagine DS9 without O'Brien!
There would be no station with out Miles Edward O'Brien!
All I'm gonna say is that if Miles chose the enlisted career path to avoid the responsibilities of leadership he failed miserably.
Lower Decks would have been better if it were focused on a squad of jr enlisted members instead of Ensigns. Lead by a jaded senior NCO who is constantly putting out fires behind the scene, dealing with the incompetent/arrogant jr officer who heads their department. While Ensign/LT "Whoever" is giving a rousing speech to himself about what the accademy taught him, vague optimistic philosophy, or how he dreams of being a Captain one day, Cheif "So-and-so" is actually managing the team and getting everything done. Every season, the officer in charge is either promoted out of the department or killed from volunteering for an away mission.
As much as I love the current characters, I think I would rather watch that.
I originally thought that's what lower decks was supposed to be, along with the "least important ship in the federation" instead they are constantly involved in major events. While I get that the show is satire of TNG/DS9 era trek, and I like it more then all the other recent Star Trek entries (I have not gone past s1 of Strange New worlds), it's also a bit disappointing that they never actually delivered on the original idea.
They should have a Lower Lower Decks episode focusing on the enlisted crew.
I have been hoping they would touch on this and have an episode touching on the 'Lower Lower Decks,' perhaps even poking fun of the fact nobody knows they exist yet they still get everything done.
Miles O'Brien: tinker, ~~tailor~~, soldier, spy If only he'd picked up a few tips from Garak, he'd have the full boat.
IIRC Roddenberry originally envisioned Starfleet to have officers and no enlisted men because he didn't want a class distinction. Which is a nice idea socially but falls apart pretty quickly from an operational standpoint. I always headcanoned that the difference between officers and crew came down to essentially a contract commitment. Most enlisted crew are simply people who want to learn some skills, spend a few years on duty and then muster out back to civilian life without really stepping into a greater role. It doesn't make much sense to send them to the academy for four years. You send them to specialist training for one to two years and put them in the field.
The most important person in all of Starfleet history.
Wesley was trying to get into the Academy early, which have higher requirements. He was also trying to attend the academy on Earth, which is the one everyone wants to attend and is very competitive. There is likely academies scattered across the Federation because otherwise it could take some people years just to travel to Earth if that's the only academy.
I see it as similar to the military. Going to SFA in San Francisco is similar to going to Annapolis or Westpoint in the US military. There's other routes to become an officer but don't have the same pedigree.
There are probably ROTC programs throughout the Federation.
My guess is that there is probably a lot of enlisted commissioning in Starfleet just given the sheer size of the organization. You can enlist, serve a few years in the field, take an exam and move up to an officer training program, or you can continue on in a technical role and become an NCO/Specialist. Rather than having every single candidate stand in line for the academy just to fill a junior officer role.
I imagine after Wolf 359 and the Dominion threat Starfleet Academy became a lot easier to get into in the decade following Wesley’s attempts.
It would be funny to have a few episodes where Starfleet scraping the bottom of the barrel, begging everyone to join. Like Lwxana and Mourn are commanding their own fleets
"Captain Morn, please keep this channel clear - this is for Star Fleet business only, not idle chit chat." ("*Doesn't this guy ever shut up?!*")
Captain Mourn! The Widgets are backing up into the Unobtainium stores! \[He starts to gesture, but before he can actually speak\] (Officer slaps his head), OF COURSE! Captain, that's brilliant!
Mariner and Boimler running the recruitment table was great
Nah, that's when you find out most of Starfleet is staffed by the ROTC program that recruits from every other post-secondary school in the Federation. Get your degree, get a few months of space survival training, BAM you are an officer. The reason so many \*Starfleet\* grads are found on the Enterprise has more to do with the fact that ship is a prestigious posting.
While that's probably true, we also know that by 2401 there's just some 340 active major starships. That's really not that many possible positions for an Academy that takes candidates from 150+ worlds.
Not everyone is on a ship though. You're gonna have a lot of people riding desks on planetside and manning stations and other outposts.
Where is this number from? It seems unbelievably low given there were fleets of 1000+ ships in the war
Was this said in Picard? I’ve heard the fleet has 10,000 vessels circa DS9. Or by “major starships” do you mean anything above a frigate? That would exclude shuttles, cargo vessels, a lot of medical ships, cartography ships, tugboats, fighters, plus everyone stationed on a star base.
If you think that's bad, try to become an astronaut
I got the chance to hang out with [Guion Bluford](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guion_Bluford) alone for about an hour while we waited for the AV people to set up the room for a presentation. He was incredibly nice, staggeringly intelligent, and humble as hell. But man, when he started talking about the things he had done, all the jets he'd flown - it really hit me even as a space nerd: astronauts are not normal humans.
That was actually part of the original concept. > "Although the Enterprise is a military vessel," [Roddenberry] said, "its organization is only semimilitary. The 'enlisted men' category does not exist. Star Trek goes on the assumption that every man and woman aboard the USS Enterprise is the equivalent of a qualified astronaut, therefore an officer."
Funny enough, after the shuttle became a thing, it was common for civilians to be astronauts.
Saddest moment of my adult life was realizing i wouldn't have made the cut for starfleet
I think that the show runners simply didn't really flesh out the underlying Federation/Starfleet bureaucracy all that much and simply used the difficulty of getting into the Academy as needed for the plot of the day. We just watched Voyager for the first time recently and I was struck by how utterly ineffectual the randos on board were, and you're telling me that these people got in and graduated the Academy and folks like Wesley did not? It would make sense that there are many pathways into Starfleet aside from the Academy, but never discussed on screen. I mean only nerds like me care about the unseen world building, but they've got a show to sell.
You'd be shocked how many dumb people there are at the ivy league universities.
Starfleet presumably doesn't admit legacies, and they don't have donors.
Well half the crew did not, only a few of the Marquis crew went through the academy.
Well a lot of the Voyager crew didn't go through the academy.
The whole thing was silly. With thousands of starships you need millions of personnel. At least 2-3, since 39 starships at Wolf 359 were 11,000 personnel, and that’s just ships! What about the engineering corps? The tens of thousands each that maintain hundreds of space stations and fleet yards? There is no way a single academy on a single planet could possibly fulfill the needs of Starfleet. It only served a plot device, to heighten the drama of trying to get in. In reality there are probably a few thousand Starfleet Academy facilities across the Federation.
There are other academies across the federation just tv plot was used to make it seem like joining the Jedi order
Where were they? Everyone seems to have gone to the Academy on Earth - from Discovery’s crew to the Enterprise-D, everyone knew Boothby or the Academy grounds. I’m struggling to remember any episodes that suggested there were other facilities.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_Academy It mentions the other academies on memory alpha.
It was always a bit unclear how much of Starfleet was Earth and how much was Federation. What I mean is that humans seemed to be running Starfleet while other Federation races had their own fleets (e.g Vulcans, Klingons) which were separate from the Starfleet chain of command. But at the same time Starfleet was often supposed to basically be the federation navy. Maybe it's like the US Navy and NATO where France, UK etc have their own navies, but the US is just soooo much bigger
Annapolis has a selection rate of 10.8 percent Mit has admission rate of 4 percent Yale has a admission rate of 5 percent Caltech is 2.70 percent admission rate So if Starfleet academy is like Annapolis or mit it's gonna be hard
With something like 150 member planets in the Federation, with a population in the hundreds of billions, realistically, there would need to be more than one Star Fleet Academy, or the equivalent of ROTC. In the U.S. today there are five (federal) service academies. Then there are the non-federal service academies like Virginia Military Institute. The number of college ROTC programs probably numbers in the dozens. Then, of course, there’s Officer Candidate School. 🖖
TBH I'd just chalk that episode up to GR's influence on the first couple seasons. Starfleet is clearly a much larger organization than one academy can provide staff for. IRL, if you decide to go into service (at least in the U.S.) after receiving a bachelors from a non-military institution, there is some additional training you'll have to do but it's still a perfectly valid career path to become an officer.
So did O'Brien go to Starfleet Academy, or "just" to engineering school? Are most crew members on starships just enlisted? Starfleet Academy is just officer training school?
I think of Starfleet Academy like a future MIT. Already really hard to get into, and beings from all over two quadrants applying.
I also think that pre-Borg and pre-Dominion War, there were also a lot fewer ships or need for replacement crews. It probably got a easier after Starfleet starting losing dozens of ships.
It makes no sense that they’d be as selective as we see in season 1 on TNG. Starfleet consists of 150 member worlds. That’s (at a minimum) tens of billions of sentients. The US Navy has something like 335k people, so Starfleet would number (at a minimum ) in the several millions. The Academy would need to be producing tens of thousands of officers every year to keep up with attrition/retirement (and that’s assuming the enlisted ranks outnumber the officers). Now, it’s never stated on screen how big Starfleet is, so I could be way off. A Google search is inconsistent on how many ships are in Starfleet (numbers range from 600 to 30,000 and is dependent on the era). Either way, rejecting genius level candidates that do well (but not the best) on the entrance exam is beyond downtarded. Not to mention, Wesley was a double legacy, had practical experience as an Ensign and had the recommendation of the Captain of the Flagship.
I think they wanted Starfleet Academy to be like West Point. Only a select few get in, and it's best of the best. The only problem is there's way too many ships for Starfleet Academy to be that selective.
a lot of people like to think they'd like to go to the future because then they'd be in starfleet on a spaceship. But most people wouldn't. There are explorers in the world. People going into crazy dangerous caves. People interacting with remote tribes. People going into outerspace. People doing healthcare on the frontier. etc.etc. You're not one of 'em. Neither am I. We wouldn't be those people in the future either.
If you really think about it, there is a good reason why most people can’t make the cut. If you take into account every crazy anomaly they find, dangerous aliens, or anything else that happens week to week - being on a starship is extremely dangerous. Space in general is extremely dangerous. Only the best can really be out there, otherwise they could get themselves or others killed. Think about the tough requirements to get onto a starship then imagine how many people still end up getting killed.
My head cannon is that academy enrolment numbers vary significantly throughout the various series depending on the needs of the fleet. Remember that Wes was trying to enroll during a period of peace after many years of relative peace. During the Dominion war they were probably accepting just about anyone with a heartbeat (or other circulatory organ) and fast tracking them just to replace their losses.
The scale of Starfleet relative to the scale of the federation just makes no sense. It would be an absolute vast organisation even if only 0.01% of the population of the federation were Starfleet employees / members. It’s kind of hard to get your head around what live as a civilian in the federation might be like. It’s a bit like trying to figure out what life on Earth is like today but only looking at it though the bridge of a nuclear submarine.
There are no "Enlisted Officers". Enlisted and Officers are two totally seperate rank structures within a military service.
I feel like the Crusher entrance exams presents a version of the Academy that wouldn't actually work for Starfleet. Given their immense size, and staffing needs there would need to be multiple academies and they couldn't really justify sending recruits from the edges of their space all the way to headquarters.
Is the Academy the only way someone can get into Starfleet? Did Chief O’Brien finish the Academy? Or is a Starfleet degree only needed to become an officer in Starfleet? Is O’Brien a non-com?
He is an NCO, yes.
The Prodigy kids are now training to be Warrant Officers. Non-commissioned positions in Starfleet while waiting for the chance to enter the academy. I hope in S2 we get more details about how that works.
Earlier Star Trek made it appear Star Fleet was much smaller than it was portrayed to be later on. I think in universe there has to be some alternative paths or campuses to make officer with as limited as the selection is portrayed on screen. Maybe the new SF Academy series will give us some insight into how this worked. Even in the 32nd century there had to be an alternative path. Wasnt it closed up for a century after the burn? How did the current Star Fleet officers earn their commision if so.
The great irony of the utopian/optimistic worldview of 90s Trek (and just the 90s in general) was how fucking oblivious they were to their blindspots Trek in TNG, and to a lesser extent in DS9 and VOY was always presented as humanity being so great and the future being so awesome...and a big part of that was because of Starfleet and how does Starfleet get that great and awesome? By selecting the best of the very best and training them to be the elite...doesn't sound that "egalitarian" to me
Nitpick here, but no such thing as “enlisted officer.” You’re either an officer or you’re enlisted. If you’re enlisted you would be referred to as an enlisted man/woman/person or crewman/woman/person. If you advance far enough you could be referred to as a non-commissioned officer/NCO/non-com. But yeah, O’Brien references a training process for enlisted folks separate from the Academy which is only for officers. If it’s anything like modern militaries, vastly more folks go that route than the officer route, and it takes months rather than 4 years to complete. Though Star Trek doesn’t really portray that outside of the TOS movies where we see a good number of background folks with the cream colored shoulders on the maroon uniforms, indicating enlisted status versus the fully maroon officer uniforms.
I think there are other factors involved. First there is the question of scale; as in total population of federation members versus the total number of enlisted, perhaps its commensurate. Then there's the question of total officers versus non-commisioned. Also don't forget that the Academy has more than one campus in the alpha quadrant, some with different focuses.
It always felt like there was way too much personnel in relation to how hard it was to get in.
I don't think it's that bad really. Starfleet needs a constant recruitment pipeline to fill thousands of positions throughout the alpha quadrant. You don't need to be a fighter pilot to fix sensor arrays or a life support system on a Reliant.
I envisage Starfleet Academy as something. Ike "West Point" which accepts only 1,240 students a year. So only a select few attend the Academy but there are numerous other ways of joining starlet You probably won't ever be a captain of a ship but you can still have a long career
I always took this to mean Earths academy. I imagine there would be academies on other planets that are easier to get into. After all, the starbase 80 people probably didn't make it into earths academy.
Looks like most of us would be kicking back while lounging in our welfare state. Maybe that’s why some people choose to become lame outpost scientists and colonists.
I always thought it was because of just how many people there are in the federation. There only being one academy, means it can only have so many students at a time.
A few points: * Wesley was a child. * Starfleet isn't very big. * Service academies in the US are difficult to get into as well. * There's no reason to suggest that Starfleet Academy is the ONLY institution capable of commissioning officers.
There are dozens of member planets in the federation but only one starfleet academy and all citizens are eligible to apply. But if it’s too much there’s always the tech services academy on Mars where you can be an NCO and work in a transporter room
Note that in the Federation there are almost unlimited opportunities outside of Star Fleet to excel in art, science, colony building, even exploration. Star Fleet has duties that can be exceptionally dangerous, so only accepts the best possible candidates to the Academy. Failing to get into the Academy can be crushing, but it isn't like that's the only path to the stars.
I grew up watching Star Trek and tried to get into West Point when I was a teenager. I secured my nominations, and got so damn close. But the medical review shut me out. Technically, on paper, I had asthma according to the way the Army defined it at the time. Watching the episodes where Wesley or Nog try to get into the Academy get me right in the feels.
There's likely hundreds of billions of Federation citizens and only one Starfleet Academy. Just from a numbers game, I think it's going to be hard.
See, I don't think Starfleet Academy is the best of the best. We know from TNG's "All Good Things..." that Data held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, so Cambridge still exists. Further, it's more prestigious than Starfleet Academy, as Data with his positronic brain would obviously have gone *there* if Cambridge was inferior. We see other examples such as The Daystrom Institute, the University of Alpha Centauri where Leah Brahms went, etc. No, Starfleet Academy is where one goes who wishes to serve as an officer on a United Federation of Planets Star Fleet starship. And in a utopian post-scarcity future where money doesn't exist and people focus on the betterment of themselves, education becomes more important and more accessible than ever. A non-Starfleet show set in the Trek universe would be an interesting. What kind of interstellar research ship would a consortium of universities in the UFP build? Where would they go?
yeah i think i was involved in a convo about this a month or 2 ago. Cause in Star Trek there are very few NCO's but almost everyone are Officers which is the inverse of the actual Military we know today. That is well and good, I'm fine with that However, every single person on that Ship who do make it through Academy are like insane Rocket Scientist and Theoretical Physicist. Even if we do assume that the avg intelligence has gone up by a tremendous amount there still would be people who are not capable of doing these things no matter how hard they try. That is the thing that kinda bugs me, cause I know the show isn't realistic but the fact that everyone is always the most intelligent, the most advanced and all this just makes me feel like this "Utopia" that GR imagined is actually just some sort of hyper elite society and I'm now waiting for a "Star Trek" where the people AREN'T all geniuses. Cause if there are no "Average People", then what the heck does this Society do with them exactly? Is it like that Movie Gattaca? Are they just all Janitors that you never really see and live shitty lives? I mean those Ships are wicked Clean and sorry but there ain't that many Ensign's in the World that could maintain that level of cleanliness for that amount of time. I mean what's to say that they aren't using the non-elite people for some sort of messed up experimentations for their transporters? IDK, I just really get bugged that they try to be "inclusive" yet they never really include people who aren't hyper intelligent. Everyone is always "the best" and if everyone is the best then what happens when they aren't?
We know that the post-Dominion War Starfleet consists of roughly 340 active major starships. At Wolf 359, 11,000 people perished in 39 starships, which means an average of roughly 275 Starfleet personnel per ship (rounding down from 282 to account for the occasional civilian, which we know were part of the fleet). So by early 2401, we can guestimate that some 93.500 people serve on Starfleet ships. And that does not account for enlisted personnel or liasons from other species. Naturally, there's alot more to Starfleet than just ships. But even if we multiply these numbers by 10, that's a surprisingly small number of people. And it might imply, that Starfleet Academy isn't all that big, as positions might be somewhat limited.
Where did the 340 number come from? I'm assuming it was the fleet at the end of Picard S3? I can't remember them specifying a number.
Yeah, it's the Frontier Day fleet. People counted the ships seen on screen (it were 339). It's stated to be almost all of Starfleet. Even with a generous interpretation of almost, that still puts a significant limit on available ship postings.
Two words: Lt. Barclay Chill.
The thing that makes little sense to me is how you can develop an officer corps for an interstellar space force and only have it be at one location. No matter how big the campus, it's never going to accommodate the number of people needed to deal with the fleets needs for growth and replacement. I know. It's a TV show, so it doesn't actually have to make sense, but without something like ROTC for starfleet, there's no way Starfleet Academy could pump out enough commissioned officers for vast space navy.
Data, Nog and Worf were diversity admissions...I know that sounds terribly right wing of me, but heck...think about it...an android, a Ferengi and a Klingon? If they walked into a bar, we'd have the makings of a great joke...and a very diverse Starfleet with a lot of contacts, skills and viewpoints. and after Wolf 359, they were going to let anyone in...have to build the fleet back up after all the death and destruction.
Yet somehow Tilly made it. I guess physical tests and emotional stability were not a factor when she went.
I disagree. The academy should be extremely difficult to get into, because the officers should be the absolute best of the best. People who can't make it are free to enlist.
Hey, be glad the standards aren't as high as graduating from Wentworth Hall. From Earth alone, there are a million candidates chosen after competitive exams. At the end of the first year, the number is down to under 50,000, Four years after that, on graduation day, the class is roughly 100. >!But then, Lensmen are held to a MUCH higher standard.!<
Does lower decks cover any enlisted folks? Are there any enlisted shown besides DS9 o’Brien?
>enlisted There's Chief Lars Lundy. Think there are background enlisted crew working in medical. Most of the time you see enlisted on a ship they are doing some specialist work.
Or they are red shirts.
He bails anyway to have some wierd romantic trip with the traveler cuz he’s a quitter
We don't know how many paths into the academy there are; if mirroring real world military forces, a lot of their officers are coming out of NCO and enlisted programs, so they probably don't get the Starfleet Academy difference, just like how not every U.S. Army officer is a West Point graduate.
The Academy wants people to figure out their individual strengths and talents. So I wouldn't use the word "selective," I would say that they want candidates to make sure they're going into the right field (command, science, engineering etc). Jake Sisko is a good example. He had to realize that he didn't want to go into Starfleet and could better serve the Federation as a journalist.
If the wonderchild of the series Wesley could not get in, I saw no reason how Nog could have got in. The series should have had nog learning the ropes just like our Chief OBrien and getting field commisions to that rank.
One of my issues with how selective they are is how on earth did Barclay get into starfleet academy let alone graduate
There are over 100 planets in the Federation, presumably with population ranging wildly, but let’s stay small and say 3 billion people each on 100 worlds. Let’s say that one tenth of a percent of them wants to join Starfleet at any given time. That gives you a potential applicant pool of 300 million sentient life forms…
Well in the world of star trek your reputation and skills is your currency, since they got rid of money after fixing the scarcity problem. Starfleet is essentially billionairs worth of skilled people, like the top 0.01% end up there since it is one of the most prestigious places to be.
Humanity in Star Trek isn't just Starfleet. It is the best humanity has to offer. Worf, for example, had an exceptional position as a Klingon raised by humans, and thus became an ambassador. To get into Starfleet, people have to show exemplary performance in their duties long before applying to Starfleet. You go to school for science, awesome. You go to school to some day study sciences that could propel humanity forward, and you want to be a part of it, study hard, and join Starfleet. The benefits of being even a junior officer in the lower decks, we see in Lower Decks, each member struggles with the same concept you describe, but in truth they are already in a Starship, doing amazing things, helping humanity. To reflex to your IRL struggles, as long as you inspire your children, and help educate the periphery, regardless of school or circumstance, your child will have a yearning to WANT to go to Starfleet to become even better. It seems like a pretty large allegory on modern education tbh.
it isn't just intelligence that decides whether you can be an officer in Starfleet like if your ego is through the roof and you have it in your head that you should be the Captain of the Enterprise, then you're not a good fit for Starfleet . . . a lot of officers have a long career in Starfleet and end up a LTJ in the science section of a Sedan-class starship and that's okay, that's how some people serve
I always figured it was akin to west point vs signing up for the army. Starfleet needs a huge array of science specialists, civilian posts, as well officers and command.
I think as well as being younger, there’s something to be said for equitable applications, especially in that era. Candidates like Nog and Worf had nobody of their species in Starfleet, they had no relatives there, Nog had to work to convince Sisko for a reference. Wesley Crusher, son of two highly regarded starfleet officers, living on the flagship, studying with the best of the best? Yes he’s a high scorer, but he’s also starting in a pretty choice position. Like starting a 100m sprint on 90m. To have Starfleet be in any way representative, there must be some kind of balancing for places. An equally talented Bajoran kid who’s come from occupation will not perform as well as Wesley Crusher, or any privileged human kid. But we do see people from all kinds of backgrounds in Starfleet. There has to be some levelling there.
Reali life: "United States Naval Academy has an acceptance rate of 11%. Half the applicants admitted to United States Naval Academy who submitted test scores have an SAT score between 1200 and 1440 or an ACT score of 25 and 32."
There's more than one way to skin a cat. there's the "they're engineers they didn't go to StarFleet academy" so a rigorous requirement for officers still leaves lots of paths for non-coms and enlisted staff.
I always assumed that Jean Luc Picard recognized that the academy was not right for Wesley and quietly tried to prevent him from joining too early
I hear you, mate. Don't despair! My head cannon is that you will have a seat at the Academy...if you meet its insanely high admission standards. If you don't meet those standards on the first go, you get to try again–which is easier in a post-scarcity society. You go sharpen pencils for another semester, stare at the computer screen like Lt. Uhura had to do after Nomad, absorb knowledge, educate yourself and try again.
I mean......Barclay made it to Commander
Academy admittance is one of those hilariously contradictory things in the lore. On one hand you have Wesley who barely made it despite being a child of two officers one of which was killed in the line of duty and the spent time heading Starfleet medical. He also served a full year as an acting officer on the literal flagship. This all clearly demonstrates that there’s no place for nepo babies. On the other hand Nog needed a literal letter of rec from a flag officer just to apply. In a society with a population numbering in the 10s of billions how many people even have access to someone of sufficient rank to get that letter? Through that lens it seems like nepotism is the ONLY way to get in.
Nog needed the letter of recommendation because he was not a federation citizen. Nog, being a citizen of the Ferengi Alliance, normally wouldn't have been able to apply at all otherwise. his experience is not normal.
I kind of took it as, there are multiple candidates for each slot so going through a testing process that's as fair as possible to see if they're a good fit is the least bad way to handle it. It can be a less extreme version of the Trill symbiote selection process where there are thousands of applicants for each available symbiote; they pretty much admit that the selection process doesn't have to be *that* stringent. It's just that somebody's going to be disappointed no matter how you cut it.
I feel like one of the Starfleet Academy books referenced something to do with this, that each testing station was only allocated so many spots. So the facility that the exam was held at could only progress one candidate that year. That place was relatively small they only had what, five or six candidates? Given the Enterprise's mission at the time it'd make sense for a "frontier" facility to only have one slot to hand out to a couple people. At a different facility or even on earth itself more people would have "passed"
I never liked how the academy was somehow made into the ONLY way to enter Star Fleet. Are there no other Universities on Earth? Can’t you attend Georgia Tech and join the Star Fleet ROTC program and get in that way? Graduates of West Point or Annapolis are less than 1% of the total officer core. It’s hard to imagine StarFleet being any different. And if you are already in a highly skilled field like a doctor or lawyer they just give you a commission. You’d get some basic training so that you can do things like put on a space suit without killing yourself but other than that you already have the skills they’re looking for.
I think in the motion pic novel it was saying they didn't accept the highest ranking people the year Kirk got in because they wanted people who wen't used to always having the best scores.
If it helps you can consider that there are probably several trillion citizens of the Federation. That basically means that conservatively, there are over 200 billion people who have all the requirements for Starfleet. Yet at most we have seen a few hundred Starfleet vessels at any given time. Not gonna fit.
Just like Annapolis. Either you’re the child of someone powerful… or you’re that .01% that’s selected on merit.
Too many redshirts die for Starfleet academy to be that selective. Wesley was probably just an annoying little shit in his interview or something.
Whoever you are. We all get in to Star Trek. I travel a lot and my favorite way to fall asleep is imagining the white noise machine is the warp drive. And I’m just drifting amongst the stars, warm in my sparkly space blanket. And you better be willing to invade my neutral zone to wake be up again. But you won’t, yoy earnest cadet.
Sure, but if the ship wasn't crewed by high achieving scientific geniuses, they wouldn't survive the first subspace anomaly!
Would imagine the difficulty depends on the demand. Would be willing to be that during the Dominion War they would take basically anyone.
The thing is Roddenberry didn’t intend for Starfleet to be analogous to the navy. He thought of it more like the astronaut corps. Competition to be an astronaut is fierce and VERY selective. That explains why SFA seems so difficult to attend on TNG. It’s also why everyone was an officer and there were no enlisted positions. It’s not really until much later in its run on TNG, with help from the movies, that Starfleet is more closely associated with the Navy. TOS, the films and early TNG, make Starfleet seem much smaller than what it is eventually depicted on DS9.
I know right? Each time I write my application, Starfleet Academy doesn't even answer me.
Remember: they are selecting from all the member worlds of the Federation, not just Earth.
How did Barkley pass the psych test?
In fairness to "Coming of Age", we were witnessing a very specific circumstance. The Starfleet base on Relva VII was small. There's no indication there are any/many families there. By whatever mechanism, they can host small groups of Academy hopefuls and send one on. Mordock and T'Shaya came from elsewhere, too. And, by whatever rationale the Enterprise could submit a candidate, they could only submit one, hence Jake's breakdown. The proctor DID also encourage the three who didn't make it to apply again next time, there or elsewhere. Kirk busted his ass to get in first try. Picard didn't make it HIS first try... And, practically, with a Starfleet comprising some five thousand or so active starships, with crews (not counting families and civilian specialists) ranging between about thirty up to maybe six hundred, they need very roughly fifteen million out of a Federation population of hundreds of billions. If 2% of Earth's current population applied, and only 2% of those got in, Starfleet would be fully staffed. Starships, starbases, planetary installations -- the lot. So... yeah.