OK, but the football rivalry can’t include every single cadet. Some are female, some are short, some are better suited for basketball.
It’s not the only sport being played, either.
It’s not that I thought the math or science would be “lite”; just that the time taken up by directly military-related courses and activities would diminish the amount of comparable coursework a civilian engineering student would get.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with the service academies, but they do get at least a few bad apples in the Corps. A judge recently held them liable for Katrina-related flood damage. I hope that’s just an aberration; in my city of Los Angeles we couldn’t be happier with the way they concreted our river. Seriously it is ugly but it certainly does the job and hasn’t failed in 60 years. Generally I’d have to say they do kick a lot of ass, what with being able to build a road virtually anywhere, or to invent whatever novel design is needed at a moment’s notice, to get the job done.
Yeah well, my own engineering school is one of the hardest in Spain and you get 0-2 bad apples every year too (out of 80). There was a girl in my class I wouldn’t hire to cook instant soup and she went straight into a job with Lloyd’s as a management systems auditor: the general agreement among everybody who’d met her in college was “if I have a say, wherever I work won’t hire Lloyd’s for our ISO audits.”
They’re expected to put in as much “study” work as in a civilian college; they just have to be more efficient about it. And they have “study” requirements which most civillian colleges don’t, for example I think it was Annapolis which required two foreign languages circa 1997. IIRC, the ones who had two groups of sports (individual/social and team) and you had to pick one from each group was USAFA.
For good fictional treatments of military academies, I’d recommend Robert Heinlein’s Space Cadet (about an orbital academy for the officers of a future United Earth planetary patrol force - it’s more than a little dated now, but still a good read) and Pat Conroy’s The Lords of Discipline (obviously patterned after The Citadel, which Conroy attended during the 1960s, and dealing with the Vietnam War and desegregation). Both very, very different books, but quite interesting, and a good mix of day-to-day minutiae and big-picture stuff. Don’t know if anyone’s ever written a good book about Starfleet Academy, but the ST:TNG episode “The First Duty” is definitely worth a look.
Haven’t read it myself, but I’ve heard nothing but good about David Lipsky’s 2003 book Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point.