After about two years of operation, the Navy’s pre-boot camp program for recruits who need help meeting the physical and academic requirements for service is proving to be useful, and leaders say they want it to stay.
“I want to maintain it,” Rear Adm. Jeffrey Czerewko, who oversees the Navy’s schools as head of Naval Education and Training Command, told Military.com in an interview last week.
Czerewko said the Navy has had to make adjustments to the program, known as the Future Sailor Preparatory Course, or FSPC, but that he sees it continuing to be valuable even as the service seems to be heading out of a recruiting slump that made the program necessary in the first place.
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The FSPC kicked off in the spring of 2023 following in the footsteps of the Army, which created a similar program the year prior. At the time, the services were reeling from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as several other long-simmering issues that all came together to create shortfalls of thousands of recruits for the two services.
The idea behind the FSPC was that it would take would-be recruits who fall short of either the academic or physical fitness standards needed to enter boot camp, ship them out anyway, and then offer up to 90 days of courses to get them up to standards on location.
The program worked and was, in no small part, responsible for the Navy making its recruiting goals last year.
Cmdr. Stephanie Turo, the spokeswoman for the Navy’s recruiting command, told Military.com in October that more than 5,000 recruits had attended the prep courses in the past year, with a large majority, 3,451 recruits, going for the academic portion.
The Navy’s 2024 recruiting goal was 40,600 recruits. It signed up 40,978.
Though officials acknowledge the recruiting value of the program, Czerewko also said that the idea of taking someone who has the desire to serve and getting them to the level where they can serve — and serve in desirable jobs — is the foremost reason to keep the program around.
“Anytime I can increase the performance of a human being, it’s better for the Navy,” he said.
However, now that the Navy has been running the course for two years, there is also enough data to begin to investigate whether the recruits whom the prep courses bring in actually add value to the service — beyond just helping it meet its recruiting goals.
For the fitness portion of the program, the data provided by Czerewko’s office shows that recruits who came to the Navy’s boot camp at Great Lakes, Illinois, in 2024 did better than their traditional peers, with only 1.6% dropping out from basic training compared to the 10% rate for regular recruits.
However, once they progressed to follow-on training, that drop rate went up to 6.4% for prep school sailors compared to just 0.6% of non-FSPC participants after 6 months of service.
Those figures are improvements from the 2023 numbers, and officials said that, overall, there were “strong outcomes for recruits who complete the course.”
The story on the academic side of the program — where the majority of FSPC recruits end up — is more complicated.
A More Complicated Academic Picture
The academic FSPC program is aimed at taking recruits with the lowest category of scores on the military’s entrance exam and moving them up into the next highest bracket.
In the waning days of 2022, the Navy announced that it was going to accept what the military calls “Category IV” recruits, or high school diploma-holding applicants who score between the 10th and 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AFQT.
The military branches have limits on how many of those applicants can ultimately progress into active duty, so the academic component of the FSPC aimed to take 75% of FSPC recruits and tutor them to be able to retake the AFQT with a “Category III” score or higher — above the 31st percentile.
Czerewko said that the Navy data showed it was falling short of the 75% benchmark — about 62% of those recruits were making the cut.
The admiral noted that sailors who can’t make the test score cutoff are separated from the service, “and that’s work a recruiter shouldn’t need to repeat.”
As a result, the Navy began raising the minimum AFQT score to even enter the program throughout last year. In May 2024, the Navy bumped the minimum score to the 16th percentile, then 21st in August, and now the recruiting requirement is a score in the 26th percentile.
“This gives us the highest probability for success that sailors will matriculate into Cat 3+,” Czerewko said in an email last week.
As a result of those tweaks and experiments, the dropout numbers for the academic side of the prep course are messier.
In 2024, the academic prep course lost about 33.95% recruits before they even began boot camp, with 23.3% specifically out over academics.
However, the recruits that did make the cut, like their fitness prep course counterparts, did better than the average boot camp recruit, with only 0.7% dropping out.
After boot camp, 10.6% of those academic prep course sailors dropped out after six months compared to just 0.6% of non-FSPC participants.
While there is a notable difference in the dropout numbers for both the fitness and academic tracks, officials noted that overall, the Navy’s six-month dropout rate is “lower than historical averages” and has been trending down for the past 5 years.
In 2024, it was just under 10% at six months, compared to 12.62% in 2020, according to data provided by the Navy.
Seeing Beyond the 6 Months
“So they completed A-school, they showed up, how are they doing after that, right?” Czerewko said, before answering: “I don’t have that visibility.”
Many of the Navy training programs take longer than that — some last years — and staying in through basic schooling is not necessarily indicative of performance in the fleet. Czerewko acknowledges that “a lot of things could hide from my sight outside of 180 days.”
But the admiral says he’s asked the Navy’s personnel boss to “go to supply chain attrition,” which would allow him and his successors to see where the more than 30,000 sailors who undergo training are dropping out throughout the training pipelines.
“They got to make it through training, and they have to show up in the fleet on time, well trained,” he said.
In the meantime, the admiral, a fighter pilot by training, says that he is continuing to tweak the program while stressing that the aim is to provide the best sailors he can to commanders in the fleet.
“I’m in the Navy, clearly. My wife was in the Navy. I’ve got five kids in the Navy. … I care so much, so much about who they’re working with,” he said.
“Two of my kids are in aviation. … Who’s working on their jets?” he added, stressing the personal nature of his mission.
Czerewko says that one addition they’ve recently made is sending officers who are in the process of shifting specialties to the course for short stints “to lead those sailors and to tutor them, along with the instructors.”
The idea is that recruits would learn from the young officers who have more time in the Navy than them while the officers would be offered opportunities to lead and mentor — skills they will need throughout their time in service.
“Can you imagine someday … some lieutenant JG, on a ship, and in walks one of the kids he coached, he mentored — that would just be cool,” Czerewko said.
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