(For more background, read Military Service Members and Veterans in Higher Education: What the New GI Bill May Mean for Postsecondary Institutions, a new report from the American Council on Education)
Veterans Are Ready for College; Are Colleges Ready for Them?
by Susan M. Headden
Fresh faces are a familiar part of the September campus scene. But this year, more of those faces will be older, wearing experiences that few other undergraduates can share. The students are military veterans, and they are returning to college in unprecedented numbers thanks to a generous new GI bill that expects to pay out $78 billion in federal assistance over the next 10 years. Nearly half a million veterans have already signed up for the benefit, which pays tuition up to the highest public undergraduate rate in a state. Along with a monthly housing allowance and a $1,000 stipend for books, the bill virtually eliminates financial barriers to higher education.
“It is absolutely the greatest veteran’s benefit there has been in 60 years,” says Tom Tarantino, legislative director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “It is life-changing, revolutionary.”
The bill is revolutionary for colleges, as well. The population of veterans on campus is expected to increase by 20 percent over the next few years, bringing cost as well as opportunity. More than half of institutions that responded to a survey by the American Council of Education (ACE) said they currently provide veterans’ services, and most said they were considering adding more—mainly training faculty and staff in veterans’ issues and seeking funding for veterans programs. According to ACE, fewer than half of schools with veterans’ programs now offer training and information for staff—a function that focus groups have called essential.
Special assets
Veterans bring mature sensibilities, a worldly outlook, and many other assets to the classroom. More so than many traditional students, educators and advisors agree, they are focused, public-spirited, and determined. “Vets generally know what they want; there isn’t a lot of educational meandering,” says Tarantino.
Jon Henry, the veterans’ liaison at the University of Maine at Augusta, says he values veterans as students who have “experienced life in the trenches, demonstrated a capability to thrive in hostile environment. They are often leaders, and they are not afraid to speak up.” The university system enrolls 275 veterans, Henry says, and expects to add 100 more in the next few years.
At the same time, veterans present colleges and universities with a number of challenges that many are not yet prepared to meet. According to a 2008 RAND study, as many as 18 percent of the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts have suffered from psychological problems such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or depression.
Derek Blumke, the president of Student Veterans of America, said his organization reported two suicides in one week in August and seven in the past nine months. Even veterans fortunate enough to have left the service psychologically and physically unscathed tend to have difficulty making the transition from military to college life, experts say.
“You go from doing the most important thing you are ever going to do in your life to hanging out on a college campus where students are joking and having fun, and you see a flag at half staff and you’re hoping it isn’t one of your friends,” says Blumke. “You no longer have that connection, that mission. You feel out of place.”
Jonathan Zapien, a U.S. Marine who served with the elite Special Forces, says he had an easier time than most adjusting to life at George Mason University (GMU), but he says it was tough to listen to 18-year-olds “giving their ‘learned’ opinions about what we were doing.”
Huge disconnect
Used to smoothly functioning systems and clear chains of command, vets are often tripped up by college bureaucracy, frustrated by a world far less organized than the one they left. “Other students had high school guidance counselors, they had parents who went to college who helped prepare them, but these students can come out of the military blind,” says Laura Conley, director of the Adult Focus program at the University of Akron.
Blumke, a U.S. Air Force vet, returned first to a community college, then attended the University of Michigan “I got passed around six or seven times, and wandered around just to get my GI bill started,” he says. He then encountered students who asked him how many people he had killed. “I wasn’t spit on or yelled at,” he says, recalling the grim homecomings of Vietnam War era vets, “but there was just this huge disconnect.”
When it comes to financial matters, institutions follow a mix of policies, some of which can present hardships to veterans. Many public colleges offer discounts like in-state tuition for veterans or their family members, but advocates for veterans say that institutions must be more accommodating to students who are deployed while they are enrolled. According to ACE, only 23 percent of reporting institutions with vet programs have developed an expedited re-enrollment process to help students. Sixteen percent even require students returning from deployment to reapply.
These barriers are compounded by two academic issues that veterans traditionally face. One, most veterans require some sort of remedial education before starting college, some because they have lost skills in the years since high school and others because they weren’t college-ready in the first place. Many, in fact, have received GEDs through the military, which has lowered recruitment standards to fill the ranks. According to figures from the Department of Defense, more than 70 percent of new recruits in 2007 lacked a high school diploma—and four years earlier that figure was a whopping 94 percent. Community colleges, which enroll large numbers of adult students, are well-equipped to provide this developmental help, more elite four-year colleges less so.
Credit where it’s due
A larger issue is the granting of academic credit for military experience. In making determinations for credit, colleges follow rules set by the ACE’s “Guide to the Evaluation of Educational Experiences in the Armed Services.” According to ACE, hundreds of thousands of active and former military have received academic credits for their military work. Still, veterans repeatedly complain of being denied credits they believe they have earned. Blumke points to a string of student vets with valuable experience—one at an Ivy League university who had completed leadership school, one at another Ivy who had significant medical training, and one at a prestigious public university who got exceptionally high marks in a difficult course in nuclear engineering. None received any academic credit.
“These are some of the most important skills you can learn— leadership, communication, management—the sort of course that every student should be required to take,” says Blumke.
Likewise, Zapien says he didn’t expect his maritime training to count toward his government major at GMU but he had hoped at least for credits in public speaking. “I have attended two leadership schools, I’ve led troops in combat, and I’ve got the speaking ability,” he says. “But unfortunately that’s the policy.”
Because of examples like these, many colleges are re-evaluating their policies on awarding credit. But Michael Johnson, the veterans affairs coordinator at George Mason, says the issue is complicated. “You may have experience with jet engines and working on power plants, but it would be difficult to give credit for something we don’t teach,” he says. “Now if you were an MP, do you get credit for intro to criminal justice? That’s a difficult piece.” It’s difficult, says the former marine, because military training, unlike academic education, tends to be limited and very specific. “It’s bare bones training,” he says. “There is no military person who ‘fails’ a training course. He might get recycled, but he doesn’t fail.” So the question, he says, is how does a school judge?
As colleges freshly consider these academic issues, they also are looking at ways to smooth veterans’ social and emotional paths. Top among ACE recommendations is a separate place for veterans to meet. The University of Maine at Augusta, just 10 miles from a VA hospital, has a designated veterans lounge and connects veterans with VA counselors and peer mentors. The college also participates in the Yellow Ribbon program, in which colleges—with a match from the VA— help pay tuition not covered by the GI Bill. The school also received an ACE Wal-Mart Foundation grant that it will use to train staff, perhaps with a speaker series, brown bag lunches, or an online presentation.
Mississippi State University has a veterans staff of six. At San Diego State University, near a U.S. naval base, veterans not only have their own center—for counseling, meetings with the VA and the like—but their own house. The house, on fraternity row, has apartments that can accommodate 23 people for $800 a month each. Veterans coordinator Joan Putman says veterans tend to be active participants in outside activities, but at the same time, she says, “they are tribal. There is a special connection between them that comes from fighting for the guy next to them.”
Legal loopholes
The GI Bill itself is a generous one, but, significantly, it does not pay a housing subsidy for students engaged exclusively in distance learning—a perceived inequity that critics hope to change. And because it pays only the highest public tuition in a state, it presents hardships for students in the District of Columbia, for instance, whose most expensive public institution is a relatively low-priced one. Likewise, the California state system’s practice of charging “fees” instead of tuition threatened to keep benefits from vets attending private schools, but the loophole in the wording has since been changed.
On top of these and other problems is a more immediate one—a huge backlog of claims. As of Aug. 18, the VA put the backlog at 57,000; other disputed sources put it far higher. Many colleges have assured students they can enroll anyway, but administrators remain concerned about reported delays in the awarding of certificates of eligibility.
Troubling as they are, bureaucratic snags are to be expected—as are the misconceptions of traditional students, the reservations of faculty, and the anxiety of the veterans. But the impact of this landmark bill is likely to raise awareness of veterans’ education across the board. “Right now we’re talking about a complete public education,” says Tarantino. “This conversation will be very different in a year or two.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist Susan M. Headden—who worked for more than 10 years as a senior editor at “U.S. News & World Report” magazine—is a freelance writer and editor based in Washington, D.C.
