An Academic ‘Boot Camp’ Tells Soldiers, You Belong Here

The study group starts at 8:45 a.m., when a typical undergrad might still be snoozing, but none of the participants are late, and no one appears tired or hungover. The students — veterans and active-duty service members attending a weeklong humanities “boot camp” here at Amherst College — are accustomed to early wake-up calls.

For the next hour, the students review readings from two ancient texts assigned to them by their classics professor, Frederick T. (Rick) Griffiths: The Histories, by Herodotus, and A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. The first is a debate among three aspiring leaders of Persia arguing for different forms of government: democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.

Stuart Townsley, 28, a former sniper with the Navy SEALs who wants to be a philosophy professor, observes that Darius’s claim of a divine right to rule “seems to be a common way for monarchies to establish legitimacy.” Later he argues that the stallion, whose whinny ultimately settles the contest, represents the material world, while the lightning that appears at the moment it whinnies symbolizes the divine.

Macie Liepe, 23, who operates nuclear reactors at a Naval submarine base in Georgia and hopes to attend Yale University when she is discharged, wonders if the story is meant to be allegorical or historical. “That’s a good question for the professor,” suggests Hunter McAllister, a boot-camp alum who is leading the study group.

The camp at Amherst is one of a couple dozen held by highly competitive colleges this summer, part of a decade-old effort to raise the academic aspirations of enlisted veterans and service members and ready them for what can be a difficult transition to the classroom. Like a military boot camp, these sessions in the humanities, STEM, and business and entrepreneurship aim to impart the attitudes, habits, and knowledge necessary to succeed in a challenging environment — while toughening up the participants a bit. They’re not as physically grueling as the military version, but they’re mentally exacting, with 12-hour days filled with complex readings, difficult discussions, and intensive writing instruction.

The goal, explains Ryan Pavel, chief executive of the Warrior-Scholar Project, the nonprofit that runs the boot camps, is for students to finish the week believing they can meet the challenges and rigor of an elite institution — even if they opt for a less-selective college.

Each year, roughly 115,000 students transition out of the military and into higher education. But only a tiny fraction of them enroll in a competitive institution like Amherst. At U.S. News and World Report‘s top 20 colleges, student veterans make up barely 1 percent of the undergraduate student body.

That underrepresentation is at least partly due to self-selection. Many former service members stick to community colleges, online for-profits, and regional publics, seeing selective colleges as too expensive or unwelcoming to vets. Some feel academically unprepared, or doubt they’d fit in with the colleges’ privileged, and often younger, undergrads.

While 2.6-million veterans and their dependents have taken advantage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill since its inception in August 2009, barely 10,000 of them have attended an Ivy League institution — and that number includes spouses and children of veterans, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

It’s also attributable, in part, to the fact that selective colleges haven’t traditionally done much outreach to veterans, ceding the market to for-profit institutions, with their slick marketing and often aggressive sales pitches. In the 2022 fiscal year, more than $1 billion in GI Bill benefits went to for-profit institutions, and three of the top five recipients were for-profits: American Public University System; Full Sail University, and the University of Phoenix online, the VA’s data show.

That’s starting to change, though, as colleges — confronted with a decline in the number of high-school students and seeking a diversity of perspectives and experiences — turn to adult learners to fill seats.

Amherst, which had only two veterans in 2010, now has a dozen — still a small number, but progress at a college with fewer than 2,000 students. Princeton University has gone from one veteran a decade ago to 40 today, according to an annual survey by Wick Sloane, a longtime advocate for veterans who retired from Bunker Hill Community College in 2019; Yale has increased its population of veterans from two to 33.

Those numbers are likely to continue to grow, as colleges of all types look for new ways to build racially diverse classes in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that outlawed the consideration of race in admissions, says Curtis Rodgers, vice dean and dean of admissions at Columbia University’s School of General Studies.

“If there’s a positive from the decision, it’s that you’ll see nontraditional students admitted at a far-greater scale than ever before,” he says. “Schools are thinking more broadly about what diversity means.”

A ‘Good Liberal-Arts Question’

Several students in the Amherst boot camp tried college before they enlisted. They left, they say, because it was too expensive, or they weren’t yet mature enough.

Stu Townsley enrolled in Montana State University “because it was expected of me,” he says, but he did a lot more hunting and fishing than studying. Macie Liepe, who is originally from Colorado, got into the University of California at Davis, but decided to start at a two-year college in California to establish the residency she needed for in-state tuition. When even community college proved too expensive, she enlisted to get the education benefits, she says.

It’s been a few years since either of them set foot on a college campus; others in their cohort have been out of the classroom since high school.

But in Griffiths’s midweek seminar on the classical origins of American democracy, the students are hardly reticent. Liepe asks her question about the Persian debate, and Griffiths answers that it’s probably an allegory — though the ancient Greeks were engaged in similar discussions at the time.

The professor puts a map of Greek colonization with the header “200 colonies in 200 years” on the overhead projector and asks the students about the perils of expansionism.

“Where else do we see examples of this principle of ‘you go too far, you lose’?”

“Vietnam,” says one student. “Russia,” volunteers another.

“And what goes wrong?” he presses.

The responses come quickly: The subjected rise up; supply lines are cut or don’t stretch far enough; the natives know the territory better than the invaders.

Griffiths hands out copies of the Gettysburg Address and asks the students how its themes echo those in the funeral oration. “What is Lincoln saying about loss and mourning?” he asks.

“He doesn’t want their sacrifices to be for nothing,” says Liepe.

“Why doesn’t he discuss grief?” Griffiths asks.

“Because he wants to motivate them,” says Mauro (Tito) Torres, 42.

“He’s using pathos and emotion,” adds Paula Enriquez, 27.

Griffiths persists: “And what are the buttons he’s pushing?”

“Pride,” answers Enriquez.

At the end of class, Torres asks Griffiths what main idea he wants the students to take from his lecture.

“Ahhh, good liberal-arts question,” says Griffiths, without answering.

Torres muses that democracy has often been treated as a “confidence game,” with charismatic leaders conning the masses into believing in a system that is rigged. Then he repeats his question.

“I’m going to leave you with a question, rather than an answer,” Griffiths says. “Can democracy be more than a confidence game?”

At lunch, after the seminar, Griffiths tells Torres that his question was “exactly the one you should be asking.” That comment, Torres says later, was “very validating.”

“I feel ultra confident that I’m going to do everything I want in college, and it’s only Wednesday,” says Torres, who joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks, but had his military career cut short by a basketball injury and has faced a string of personal and financial setbacks in recent years. He’s attending Montgomery College, in Maryland, but wants to transfer to a four-year college to study journalism or mass communications. He loves intense, thought-provoking conversations, and hopes to have his own talk show one day.

“This experience has sparked something in me that I never knew was there,” he says. “It’s a newfound feeling — almost youthful.”

Making the Argument for College

It’s not that the military offers no guidance to service members on choosing and paying for college. Before separating from any of the armed forces, members of the military are required to take part in the “Transition Assistance Program,” or TAP, which includes a course on veterans’ benefits, such as the GI Bill. There’s a two-day education track, too, but it’s optional for all but those who a self-assessment and a military counselor deem most in need of assistance. Some students take the course online, in a click-through format that takes only four hours.

Pavel and others say that isn’t cutting it. They say the quality of instructors offering the in-person course varies, and some commanding officers aren’t keen on giving their reports the time off to take it. When compared with the individualized attention that many high-school students get from guidance counselors, TAP is barely scratching the surface, says Abby Kinch, chief of staff for Student Veterans of America.

“’Wanting’ is the polite word I like to use,” says Kinch, who recently testified about the program’s perceived deficits before a panel of the U.S. House of Representatives.

She blames the program’s “severe underemphasis on higher education,” relative to employment, for the fact that student veterans report feeling isolated on campus and are more than twice as likely as traditional students to change their major, wasting educational benefits in the process.

The Warrior-Scholar Project’s boot camp is designed to be much more comprehensive, offering daily seminars taught by college professors, writing workshops led by graduate students, and study groups and college-success sessions helmed by alumni of the program. Over the course of the week here, students will wrestle with Tocqueville, become steeped in citation styles, and hone key academic skills, such as analytical reading, note-taking, and time management — all while adapting to life on a college campus.

The results are impressive: More than 90 percent of program alumni have completed or are on track to earn a college degree in a six-year time frame, compared with 72 percent of all veterans and 65 percent of traditional undergraduates.

In interviews conducted midweek at the Amherst boot camp, the participants say the military has prepared them well for the rigor and stress of college. Compared with night swimming with a bag of chum in shark-infested waters, as Townsley, the former Navy SEAL, was forced to do as a young recruit, deadlines and tests don’t seem all that scary.

They say the program is teaching them to be critical thinkers and that it’s OK to question authority, and to sometimes put their own wants and needs first.

“In the military, team is more important than feelings,” says Paula Enriquez, a former intelligence analyst now enrolled in community college in New Jersey. “College is more about the individual.”

Enriquez says she had a hard time adjusting to that cultural shift when she started college and would have benefited from attending the boot camp beforehand.

“I went from being told, ‘Your feelings don’t matter,’ to being asked, ‘Tell me about yourself,’” she says. “The old sergeant in my head was saying, ‘It doesn’t matter.’”

Academically, community college hasn’t been that challenging, Enriquez says, “but here, I’m learning from some of the best professors in the country.” She’s aspired to Princeton since she was a kid and read a book that said part of Albert Einstein’s brain was preserved there. She was excited to learn that the university recently expanded its transfer program.

“I’m making new neural connections, which helps you pull out of PTSD and depression,” says Enriquez, who has suffered from both as a result of the sexual assault and harassment she says she experienced in the military.

Liepe, who was one of the first women on her ship, says she’s looking forward to being in a setting where women make up the majority. “There’s still a heavy stigma of misogyny in the military,” she says.

She and other participants say they’re prepared for the stereotypes about members of the military that they’ll encounter on campus — that they’re all politically conservative; that people join the military because they can’t get into college — and unfazed by them.

“I’ve worked with people who are very smart, but don’t have the resources” to go to college, says Liepe, who describes herself as “quite blue,” politically. “Higher education is a luxury that not everyone can afford.”

The Business Case for Veterans

Doubts about the academic abilities of veterans date to at least the Second World War, when the president of the University of Chicago famously warned that the GI Bill would convert colleges into “educational hobo jungles,” and Harvard University’s president fretted that “we may find the least capable among the war generation … flooding the facilities for advanced education.”

In the years since, veterans have proved themselves repeatedly, graduating at rates similar to or even higher than nonveterans, and posting better GPAs and retention rates as well.

Yet even today, some college leaders still associate the term “enlisted” with “uneducated,” advocates say, failing to appreciate the skills honed in military service. In a 2014 survey conducted by Syracuse’s D’Aniello institute, more than 80 percent of veterans said the work ethic and discipline, teamwork, leadership and management skills, and mental toughness they’d developed in the military would be assets in higher education. But over half said that the colleges and universities they attended or aspired to didn’t recognize the value of those skills.

Enrolling veterans can also free up institutional aid for other underrepresented students, since they often come with a large chunk of their education financed by the GI Bill. (The latest version of that measure covers the cost of the most-expensive public college in a veteran’s home state, and up to a little more than $27,000 for students attending out-of-state and private colleges).

Yet in a report on the Syracuse survey, the founder of the institute and its research director argued that too many college leaders have yet to awaken to the “business case” for investing in veterans, instead seeing their enrollment as an obligation — “a responsibility to ‘repay a debt’ to those who have served.”

“As a result, they unwittingly contribute to a missed opportunity of historic proportions — the opportunity to make our best academic institutions richer, more dynamic, more diverse, and ultimately better,” they wrote.

But some selective colleges are starting to come around, acknowledging the skills, diversity — and yes, tuition revenue — that veterans bring. Princeton, which resumed accepting transfer students in 2018, announced last year that it would gradually expand its transfer admission program from 40 students to 100, in part to admit more veterans. The University of Chicago, which had zero undergraduate veterans five years ago, is now up to 100, thanks to a combination of targeted outreach, the adoption of flexible admissions deadlines, and the addition of veterans’ family housing, says Beau Butts, executive director of veterans’ initiatives, programs, and services.

Enrolling veterans “not only increases the diversity of campuses but helps address the civilian-military gaps that exist in our country,” Butts says. Many of the university’s traditional students haven’t had a family member serve since World War II, or have never even met a veteran, he says.

“These veterans have brought a richness of perspective to the classroom that other students and faculty sing praises about,” Butts says.

The undisputed leader is Columbia, which enrolls more undergraduate veterans than all the other Ivy League institutions combined, according to Sloane’s analysis. Twenty years into its effort to recruit more veterans, the college now has a support structure that spans the campus and a powerful reputation in the veteran community.

“We depend on our student veterans to help bring in the next generation,” says Rodgers, the admissions dean. “So often, it’s good word of mouth.”

Pavel, the head of the Warrior-Scholar Project, says he looks for evidence of university leadership when deciding which colleges to collaborate with. If they aren’t actively recruiting and serving vets, he’ll turn them down.

“The boot camp can’t be seen as a performative check-in-the-box,” he says.

Confidence to ‘Go Anywhere’

While many of the students in Amherst’s humanities boot camp have applied their high-school math and science skills in the military, most haven’t written an academic paper in years. But by the end of the week, they’re expected to produce a college-level essay on the tension between democratic ideas.

On Wednesday, the day the introduction and first two paragraphs are due, some students are nervous. During the daily writing workshop, they share their struggles with choosing a topic, narrowing down their arguments, and putting pen to paper. Chandler Steckbeck, a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who is co-leading the workshop, commiserates and offers reassurance.

“Writing words on a page is hard. If writing were thinking, I’d have a dissertation by now,” she jokes. “Having a sticky moment doesn’t mean you won’t finish your essay.”

Next, the class turns to citations, exploring the differences between MLA, APA, and Chicago style. Steckbeck asks the students to explain the point of citations, and they rattle them off: to avoid plagiarism; to lend credibility to your claim; to provide sources for further reading.

“You got them all,” Steckbeck marvels. “You guys are so much more thorough than 18-year-old freshmen.”

If these students follow the precedent set by past cohorts, roughly 20 percent will wind up at a top-20 college, according to statistics maintained by the Warrior-Scholar Project. The top three destinations for alumni are Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.

But the program takes pains to stress that participants won’t be failures if they don’t get into a highly selective institution, and nearly everyone answers no when asked whether they think it’s necessary to go to an Ivy League university to get the best education. Northern Virginia Community College and Arizona State University have also been among the top-five recipient institutions some years.

The main reason the project has focused on top-ranked colleges, Pavel says, “is to build students’ confidence that they can go anywhere.”

Looking ahead, the organization hopes to work with some top-tier state colleges, in part to expand into the Southeast, the Northwest, and more rural parts of the country. And it’s starting an online, on-demand boot camp, in partnership with Yale and Coursera.

The project is also working to build its alumni network, after surveys showed that nearly all graduates of the boot camp felt it had prepared them academically, but only a little over half felt ready for life on a college campus.

Back at the Amherst boot camp, participants say the program is helping them forge new identities as college students, reaffirming their decisions to choose college over career.

“People don’t understand how getting out of the military strips away your identity,” says Townsley, the former sniper. “Seeing people with the same backgrounds and visions for themselves is reassuring — it makes you feel less alone.”