In 1947, as hundreds of thousands of World War II veterans filled the nation’s college classrooms, Columbia University restructured its extension program to create a new undergraduate college to accommodate them. Today, as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, Columbia’s School of General Studies, as the program is known, has become veterans’ Ivy League destination of choice.
This year, 271 undergraduates are enrolled there with education benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—about three times as many as at the rest of the Ivies combined. The population of student veterans at Columbia has nearly quadrupled since 2008, just before the Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect.
“The GI Bill really knocked down one of the biggest barriers in thinking about an academic program like this, which is cost,” says Curtis Rodgers, dean of enrollment management at the School of General Studies. Its admissions process is tailored to older students, considering their life experience as well as their academic credentials. But the students are fully integrated into the university, taking the same courses and choosing the same majors as traditional students do.
Recruiting veterans into college, while a return to the program’s founding mission, is a work in progress.
Until recently, says Mr. Rodgers, a primary tactic was to hold information sessions at chosen military installations. Those sessions still take place, but mostly through the Marine Corps’ Leadership Scholar Program, which helps prospective students apply to a number of partner colleges. Community colleges, too, particularly their honor societies, are a primary means of identifying ambitious veterans.
Personal Connections
Mr. Rodgers is reluctant to reveal the details of his successful recruiting tactics. But word of mouth and personal connections, he says, work best. Although many veterans say that in the service they never saw a pamphlet for Columbia or attended one of its information sessions, the word was out, as one veteran puts it, that “Columbia was the place where high-powered veterans went.”
While reporting in New York several years ago, Karim Delgado, then a military journalist in the Marine Corps, interviewed Mr. Rodgers. But quickly their roles reversed: The dean peppered Mr. Delgado with questions about his background and educational goals. You should apply to Columbia when you get out, Mr. Rodgers told him.
Mr. Delgado listened, but he didn’t act. In his working-class neighborhood of Miami, high school hadn’t involved much learning, and he’d hated it. At 17, with a 0.96 grade-point average, he’d dropped out and joined the Marines.
He was a bookworm, however. In his barracks in Okinawa, Japan, where he was stationed for two years, he kept a small library of classics; Marines looking to borrow books would stop by. At sea he would read Jung or Plato during the umpteenth screening of a bootlegged Scary Movie 4.
Still, the Ivy League held little appeal, he says. If anything, its status was a deterrent—a symbol of class distinctions he had internalized throughout his childhood and grown to resent. But when he went off active duty, in 2008, without a degree, he was unable to get a job in what he wanted to do: community organizing. His aversion to school mellowed. He enrolled at a community college in California for a year and thrived there.
Then, in 2010, he applied to Columbia’s School of General Studies. Three years had passed since his interview with Mr. Rodgers.
“I almost started to feel a sort of kinship with the program,” says Mr. Delgado, 27, a philosophy major. “I saw its cause and my cause as the same: to try to lift people up from all these various backgrounds that historically wouldn’t be in this sort of institution.”