^ I agree about having to meet standards. It just felt odd to me in that episode, that they'd created a false sense of competition, that's all.
Picard did say to Crewman Tarses in The Drumhead "Did you ever think of going the whole route, becoming an officer, going to the Academy?" So perhaps general crew and petty officers are trained at regional centres, the Academy in San Francisco would be just for the officers.
Indeed, have we ever heard of a non-officer who would have trained in San Francisco? O'Brien's statements on that seem less than conclusive... Then again, the Academy could indeed be large enough to provide a couple of hundred thousand personnel per year for a Starfleet that employs a couple of million. The whole city of San Francisco may be their oyster for all we know. The thing that would go against that is the idea that our heroes would know each other from their Academy days. Then again, why wouldn't they, even on a class of fifty thousand? They did end up in the same assignment, after all. Surely it would be natural to think that the cream of the cream would have at least heard of each other before being sent to the Federation Flagship. Then again, which of our heroes did know of each other back in the Academy? Not too many. The top officers would indicate familiarity with their underlings, but then again, they usually hand-picked those after reading through piles upon piles of evaluation reports. Timo Saloniemi
Also remember that some students were less than stellar. One thing that ALWAYS annoyed me about Picard's backstory was that he failed his entrance exam on his First Attempt (TNG: Coming of Age), obviously studied hard to be accepted on his second attempt, then became a slacker and womaniser again (TNG: Tapestry). Yet in his time he managed to be the only freshman cadet to complete the Danula II Marathon (TNG: Best of Both Worlds), but also failed Organic Chemistry (TNG: The Game). So if Picard, being the cream of the cream, did not show any promise or was one of many who fluctuated between promise and mediocrity, is it any wonder that the top officers didn't know of each other?
1700 ships by NCC-1701? Has it ever been confirmed that the NCC/NX number system is chronological? I mean, in the DS9/Voyager era they suddenly jumped to the 70,000s... I thought the numbers were just according to class of ship, like all the Connies are 17__, and anything named after an original Constitution class is 17__-ABCDE, with the Enterprise being the only known ship to go beyond -A.
I would say that they lost a large number of ships on exploratory missions and skirmishes and such like. The Daedalus-class ships were numbered NCC-1xx, the Connies NCC-17xx, the Mirandas were 18xx, 21xxx, and 31xxx. Three different production runs of the Mirandas with three different registration sequences. We only know the NCC/NX numbers of a small number of ships, though several fan sites have extrapolated (or tried to) entire fleet lists.
There is proof that there is more than one Starfleet Academy than the one on Earth, there are even several training facilities in the solar system: http://www.jh.kobarg.de/k7/sterrors.php?q=starfleet_academy
Maybe the main campus exists in another dimension, like the TARDIS? That's how they can squeeze all those students in.