Ever since the original GI Bill set millions of World War II veterans on the path to college degrees, higher education has shaped many vets’ transition to civilian life. But as today’s returning service members confront a stagnant economy—and a society in which so few Americans share their military experience—colleges’ role in that transition is expanding. It now extends to veterans who may never set foot in a classroom.
The nation’s veteran population is expected to swell by a million or more in coming years as the military winds down more than a decade of conflicts. How veterans adjust to life out of uniform has become the subject of heightened scrutiny in the military community and beyond. Jobless rates are high among veterans. Employers are sometimes unaware of how military training can translate to the civilian workplace. And with many Americans unacquainted with military life, stereotypes of vets tend to occupy the extremes: They’re either heroes or head cases.
Out of Uniform
As veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pursue college, The Chronicle examines what that means for higher education, the economy, and the students themselves.
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Photos
Mark Abramson for The Chronicle
Richard Baldassari (left) and Nicholas Lozano, leaders of the U.S. Military Veterans of Columbia U., work on their computers in Google’s New York City offices. The company has been working with student veterans’ groups on outreach projects.
Mark Abramson for The Chronicle
Carrie Laureno, an “audience evangelist” for Google, founded VetNet, the company’s internal network of veterans and veteran-friendly employees.
With those concerns in mind, a growing number of colleges and affiliated groups are venturing beyond campus borders to try to bridge the military-civilian gap. Higher education, say scholars and advocates involved in such work, has pivotal civic and research roles to play in deepening people’s familiarity with the veteran population.
The key seems to be collaboration. Universities are forming partnerships with companies, nonprofit groups, social-service providers, and government agencies to take up a variety of challenges shared by veterans. Syracuse University has made outreach to veterans—and research on them—a particular priority, drawing in businesses and other colleges. Since 2007, Syracuse has run an entrepreneurship boot camp that trains wounded veterans to operate their own businesses. Last year the university established the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, to conduct research and advocacy on veterans’ issues.
At first the boot camp was met with skepticism from some corners of the Syracuse campus. This is not what research faculty do, colleagues told J. Michael Haynie, a professor of entrepreneurship at the university’s Whitman School of Management who now directs the institute. Leave practical application to others, they said, and focus on scholarship.
Mr. Haynie, who served as an officer in the Air Force, ignored their misgivings. Waiting two years to get a paper published in an academic journal, only to have it read by just a handful of scholars, struck him as too slow and narrow for the urgency of veterans’ issues. (He has, however, published an analysis of three years of boot-camp participants, including how traumatic experiences affected what jobs they took, in the Journal of Applied Psychology.)
“The problems in this community are right now,” Mr. Haynie says. “They’re immediate.”
Colleges, he thinks, should help. “What we’re trying to do is create a bridge on a national scale out of higher education and into the veterans community,” he says. “That is a role that higher education is uniquely positioned to play.”
Narrowing the Divide
With their substantial resources and considerable influence in local and regional communities, universities are poised both to explore the challenges veterans face and to engage civilians in finding solutions. The latter effort, advocates say, is critical to veterans’ success.
Most Americans today have only tenuous connections, if any, to the military. Beyond the tiny minority that has served on active duty in the past decade—less than half of 1 percent, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center—familiarity with current military issues doesn’t extend far. Nearly three-quarters of civilians polled by Pew said the general public doesn’t understand the problems service members face.
In Indiana, Purdue University’s Military Family Research Institute is trying to explain those problems to civilians—and to use the faculty’s research prowess to explore them further.
“It’s just what land-grant universities do,” says Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth, the institute’s director. “They respond to challenges in society. That’s their mission.” Purdue’s institute collaborates extensively with local and national organizations to help communities better support service members, veterans, and their families.
Given the social and economic ramifications of a military-civilian divide, universities should be stepping up, says Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America. “They shape the culture of a community and the economy of a community.”
One of Student Veterans of America’s projects, intended to build support for veterans in Silicon Valley, could serve as a model. The group is working closely with Google, which has recently developed technology platforms solely for military and veteran communities, as well as an internal network of more than 500 employees known as VetNet. SVA’s leaders, in turn, are helping Google learn about the service members and veterans it is eager to recruit. The company has also consulted Mr. Haynie, at Syracuse, about expanding job opportunities and offering other kinds of support for veterans.
Google’s forays into the veteran community aren’t entirely altruistic. “We have a business reason for doing this,” says Harry Wingo, a former Navy SEAL and graduate of Yale Law School who now leads the company’s recruitment of veterans. “We’re looking to get the best talent, and diverse talent.”
Collaboration between higher ed and outside groups mirrors similar attempts on the national stage to raise awareness of veterans’ issues. Among them are Joining Forces, a campaign started by Michelle Obama and Jill Biden to drum up civilian support; Hiring Our Heroes, run by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce; and Got Your 6, an effort led by the entertainment industry; its name is military slang for “I’ve got your back.”
For Mr. Haynie, the initial motivation was social: to marshal the resources of a research university to tackle unemployment among veterans. He has since found that the bridge between higher education and the veteran community goes both ways. Many participants in the entrepreneurship boot camp, which has been replicated on seven other campuses around the country, have gone on to matriculate there or elsewhere.
More than half of the veterans who take part in the program have no college degrees and no plans to pursue one, says Mr. Haynie. But in classrooms at Syracuse or Texas A&M or UCLA, their attitude changes, he says: “Maybe I can do this college thing.”
