Maybe this has been asked or answered before but im watching the tng episode where wesely takes the starfleet entrance exams and only one person gets it. Im thinking its per quadrant thing but it just seems so nuts that they take so few. Not to mention you would think two or three would be retakers. Was this ever explained?
I got the impression the one-person entrance quota was for that specific region. Like maybe the sector they were in or something. In the TNG era the Federation has something like 150 member planets, I think. Plenty of those could have billions of inhabitants each. That would imply a lot of competition for space in the one campus by San Francisco! That might require strict entrance quotas.
I don’t know if Coming of Age is consistent with other depictions of the entrance process. In other stories it seems like getting in is much easier.
I’ve heard speculation that the reason the Starfleet crews we see are so overwhelmingly human is because different species tend to stick together, and there are other ships and crews out there that are mostly non-human; but we happen to be shown the human ones in the shows. There have been explicit references to exclusively Vulcan crews, such as Sisko’s rival’s crew in Take Me Out to the Holosuite. Given the scale of the Federation I think it would make sense if there were lots of academies on different planets, and the Earth academy is the one humans mostly go to. But I don’t think there’s any hint of that in the shows.