Long before sunrise, Ron Shriver takes a seat at the dining-room table of his family’s large, yellow farmhouse. As he pores over handwritten notes, the lighted windows behind him cast a glow into the chilly darkness of the surrounding valley. Two old dogs nap near the front door.
It’s a Wednesday late in the semester, and Mr. Shriver, a senior at McDaniel College nearby, has an exercise-physiology exam in a few hours. He rose at 3:30 a.m., as he does on most test days, to cram in a final study session before his kids awake. As he concentrates, a tinny voice cuts the stillness of the house. It’s a recorded lecture playing on his iPad.
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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Watch: Ron Shriver explains what what his college degree means to his family. | Link
Photos
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
At 7 a.m., Ron Shriver drops off his daughter, Rory, 6, at day care before heading to McDaniel College.
During his eight years in the Marine Corps, Mr. Shriver held elite positions as a military police officer. Here, he and his family celebrate his promotion to staff sergeant in early 2009 at Camp Smith, Hawaii, home of the U.S. Pacific Command.
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
Rose Blizzard, right, is McDaniel’s certifying official for Department of Veterans Affairs benefits. Mr. Shriver calls her “the most important lady in my life except my wife.”
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
On a recent Wednesday, Ron Shriver had risen at 3:30 a.m. to cram in a study session before his kids awoke. For the past few months, he and his two young children have been living not far from McDaniel with his parents in an old farmhouse, pictured above at dawn, where he spent part of his childhood.
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
Before Mr. Shriver arrived at McDaniel in the fall of 2009, he wrote to Doug Renner, the cross-country and track coach, and said he’d like to compete for the college. He would have limited time to train, he said, but promised to work hard. “We’ll make it work,” Mr. Renner replied. Before graduation this month, Mr. Shriver was slated to receive an award for the most outstanding record in track and field.
Matt Roth for The Chronicle
At the end of a long day, Mr. Shriver talks on the phone to his wife, Jennifer, a fellow veteran who is pursuing her master’s degree in Alaska using the last of her Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits. In June the family will reunite in Alaska. “I could never say enough about the opportunities that McDaniel has given me and my wife,” he says.
Growing up in this community in northern Maryland, Mr. Shriver, 29, used to pass by the stately brick buildings of the college that is now McDaniel and wonder: What went on up there on that hill overlooking Main Street? What would it be like to go to a college like that? What would it be like to go to college at all?
Nobody in Mr. Shriver’s family had ever done so, and for a long time, it looked as if he wouldn’t, either. The oldest of four sons, he left home at 17. He had tired of clashing with his father, a strong-willed brick mason, and went to work nights at a local grocery store to support himself while he finished high school. During his senior year, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps under a delayed-entry program. He reported for basic training in August 2001.
In the service, he earned a top-secret security clearance and elite postings as a military police officer, first with the squadron that accompanies the president on his travels, then handling personal security for the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command. He married a fellow Marine, and they had two children.
Mr. Shriver thought he had found his career and his life. He had been promoted regularly, reaching the rank of staff sergeant in an unusually short seven years. In Virginia and Hawaii, where he was stationed during his military career, the family purchased and renovated two homes. During those years, he completed 10 general-education courses online. His goal was to earn an associate degree.
But when word came that Congress was considering a new version of the GI Bill that would allow veterans to attend college full time and have their living expenses covered, both Mr. Shriver and his wife, Jennifer—who had also joined the Marines straight out of high school, in California—paid attention.
In June 2008, the Post-9/11 GI Bill passed. The Shrivers decided: Let’s do it.
The previous version of the GI Bill, they felt, barely covered the cost of an associate degree. “Now we had a choice,” Mr. Shriver says. “We could both go to school full time, and we could do it with children, and we could afford to live.”
All at once, a path Mr. Shriver had thought impossible opened up. He could get an education. He could explore careers beyond the military and law enforcement. And he could teach his children about determination.
On May 19, Mr. Shriver graduated from McDaniel. His journey, of course, is just one among those of half a million veterans who’ve enrolled in college under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. But his hopes are emblematic of the promise the federal program has inspired.
Still, planning to leave the Marine Corps when he came up for re-enlistment the following year, Mr. Shriver says, was “scary as hell.” Many Marines who remain in the service as long as eight years usually make a full career of it. What’s more, the Marine Corps had offered him a re-enlistment bonus of $90,000.
Mr. Shriver wasn’t tempted. For so long, he had lived out of a suitcase. He would often return home to find that his young children balked at being left with a dad they didn’t really know.
“You can keep your money,” he remembers thinking. “I’m going to go develop a relationship with my kids, and I’m going to go to school.”
Staying Ahead
Only when streaks of pink and gold appear over the eastern ridge of the valley, silhouetting the silo and barn outside, does Mr. Shriver get up from his seat and walk into the kitchen. While his wife is away this year on what the couple calls an “educational deployment,” the morning routine has been his to run.
He moves about methodically, making peanut-butter sandwiches and peeling apples. If it weren’t for his straight posture and smooth, efficient manner, Mr. Shriver’s long beard and tattered cap might belie his former life as a Marine.
Lunches packed, he goes downstairs to rouse his daughter, Rory, 6, and son, Miles, 5. After a frenetic 25 minutes of brushing teeth, getting dressed, and downing cereal and waffles, the trio is out the door in a blur of backpacks and lunch boxes. The sun is up: It’s 6:45.
The children climb into Mr. Shriver’s maroon Chevy HHR, and the lecture keeps playing on the iPad as the small SUV zooms along winding country roads. Miles and Rory goof off in the back seat. For several minutes, they howl like coyotes.
Soon they arrive at the Methodist church where Rory, a merry girl with a sprinkle of freckles, will spend most of the day at a child-care center (her school is on break). Her dad signs her in, hugs her, and strides out the door.
The next stop is Miles’s school. The Chevy pulls up 15 minutes early. In the lobby, Mr. Shriver sits in a rocking chair, and Miles plops onto a beanbag chair nearby. The father pulls out his iPhone and reviews class notes. Miles, unfazed, seems to know not to disturb him. Or perhaps he’s used to waiting: “It’s a Marine thing,” his father says, “to always be 10 or 15 minutes early.”
By 7:45, Mr. Shriver has finally arrived at McDaniel. He parks and sprints up a grassy hill toward the center of campus. The exercise-physiology class usually begins at 8 o’clock, but on test days the professor starts earlier. He is familiar with Mr. Shriver’s parenting demands and knows he’ll be late today. Mr. Shriver slips into a fourth-row seat in the lecture hall and immediately gets to work.
As a parent, student, and athlete—he competes for McDaniel’s cross-country and track teams—Mr. Shriver needs to make every minute count. The previous evening, after the kids’ swimming lesson, he helped them shower and change into pajamas at the pool before heading home to bed.
He always tries to budget extra time: He hates the idea of requesting an extension for an assignment. “I have to constantly focus on staying ahead,” he says.
This past year has tested his resolve. His wife has been in Alaska pursuing a master’s degree in resource economics. Having completed her bachelor’s degree at McDaniel in two years—with a perfect grade-point average—she’s now using the last of her GI Bill benefits. So Mr. Shriver is effectively a single parent.
To make life a little easier, he and the kids moved this spring from a rental home in a nearby town to the basement of Mr. Shriver’s parents’ house, closer to campus. Soon after his graduation, the young family will reunite in Alaska.
Free Tuition
After the exam, Mr. Shriver heads for a campus cafe known as the Pub. Over a plate of French toast slathered with butter and syrup—"I burned a lot of carbohydrates on that test,” he says—the exercise-science major passionately describes his research this year on barefoot running.
Not far from the Pub is a small room McDaniel’s student veterans know well. Here, in the back of the registrar’s office, sits Rose Blizzard, whom Mr. Shriver calls “the most important lady in my life except my wife.”
Ms. Blizzard, the college’s certifying official for Department of Veterans Affairs benefits, is a warm woman with a hint of a Southern drawl. Her desk displays a small American flag and a photocopied picture of a puppy. It’s Barrett, a four-month-old Great Dane that Ms. Blizzard and her husband are training as a companion dog for veterans.
The college of 1,600 undergraduates, which changed its name from Western Maryland College in 2002, has had an increase of veterans enrolling under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Until three years ago, when the law took effect and the Shrivers came to McDaniel, the total fluctuated between 13 and 18 students a year. By 2011, that number had nearly tripled, with most veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Nationally, more than 550,000 veterans have taken advantage of that program to attend college.
Mr. Shriver remembers the moment his plans fell into place. It was the spring of 2009; the new GI Bill was set to take effect in just a few months. He and his wife had decided to leave Hawaii. Coming here to Maryland, near Mr. Shriver’s large family, seemed like the best move. (He and his father now have “a great relationship,” the son says.)
The couple applied to three colleges in the state, and McDaniel, the one Mr. Shriver had once dreamed of attending, came through. Though the GI Bill would cover much of the tuition, the balance he would still have to pay was $17,000 a year—an impossible sum. If McDaniel agreed to participate in the national Yellow Ribbon Program, in which the federal government matches any supplementary aid that colleges provide to eligible veterans, then Mr. Shriver could afford it. Would the college take part in that new program?
McDaniel said yes. Soon he got a letter confirming that his tuition would be paid in full.
“We were just kind of stunned,” he says. “Wow, I’m going to get to go to school for free,” he recalls thinking. “We are the luckiest people.”
The family rented a house, and both parents dived into their studies. Mr. Shriver decided to major in exercise science, with a minor in coaching, and to join the cross-country and track teams. Ms. Shriver discovered a passion for political science and economics. They both studied Arabic. There was even a field trip to Belize for which both received academic credit.
Mr. Shriver gets sentimental when he reflects on his time at the college. “I love it so much here,” he says. “I could never say enough about the opportunities that McDaniel has given me and my wife.”
But in the beginning especially, there were bumps. The GI Bill’s housing allowance and book stipend were often slow to arrive. Rory and Miles didn’t like preschool and didn’t understand what their parents were doing. “School is our job,” the couple would say.
Perhaps worst of all was Mr. Shriver’s nagging feeling that leaving the Marine Corps was the wrong decision.
“I should not have done this,” he remembers thinking. “I just threw away my career.”
‘My Little Marines’
By late afternoon, storm clouds gather in the distance. But bright sunlight still shines on McDaniel’s track, where a dozen or so men and women mill around, waiting for their workout to begin. Mr. Shriver has just returned from picking up the children; his mother, a school-bus driver, will come by in a few minutes to take them back to the house. Miles races onto the track and hurls a boisterous “Hi, Coach!” at Doug Renner, head coach of the track team. A moment later, the blond 5-year-old is flexing his biceps for runners on the squad.
When Mr. Shriver takes off on a warm-up lap, Rory bounds along behind him. They round the back curve, and Miles trots over. The workout then begins—800-meter repeats—and Mr. Shriver, light on his feet, leads the pack.
Nearly three years ago, before he arrived at McDaniel, Mr. Shriver e-mailed Mr. Renner, who also coaches the college’s Division III cross-country team. He wanted to run, he wrote, but family responsibilities would limit his time to train. Still, Mr. Shriver told the coach, “I will work hard for you.”
Mr. Renner’s response came right away. “We’d love to have you,” he said. “We’ll make it work.” Now, he says, the former Marine is like another coach: “If I say it, it’s in one ear and out the other,” he says of the team, “but because Ron says it, they listen.” Mr. Shriver was slated to receive an award from the college, just before graduation, for the most outstanding record in track and field.
For Mr. Shriver, who took up running ultramarathons while in the service, the experience has been pivotal. Running competitively, he says, has greatly eased his transition to campus life by offering the same kind of camaraderie he enjoyed in the service. He attends practice whenever he can. On other days, he’ll link up with a group of distance runners to do his workout.
“They’re like my little Marines,” Mr. Shriver says of his fellow runners. “I try to take care of them and help them.”
It’s all part of his teenage wish to run in college, which he thought he’d abandoned long ago. “I gave up that idea when I joined the Marine Corps,” he says. “I never thought I’d get to do that.”
He catches himself. “I mean, I never thought I’d get to go to college.”
Setting an Example
Back at the house, after a dinner of homemade cheese steaks and chips, Rory sits at the table, pulls out the iPad, and looks at a video of a trip her parents took to Alaska in 2010.
“There she is!” the little girl exclaims when her mother, blond and smiling, appears on the screen in front of snow-capped Mount McKinley.
Formidable mountains will soon be a familiar sight. Jen Shriver has accepted a job in Juneau as a research analyst with the Alaska Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission (she will finish her master’s degree while working). Mr. Shriver and the kids are set to join her in mid-June.
His next step is undetermined. He graduated with both academic distinction and departmental honors, his professors effusive about his leadership and enthusiasm. He’d enjoy coaching, he says, or working for the U.S. Forest Service. When his wife finishes her master’s degree, he might even go back into the military, this time as an officer.
For now, he’s content to be a dad. Those moments years ago when the children resisted him still weigh heavily. At McDaniel, when time was tight and he pushed himself to do well in class, a similar concern bore down the hardest. “Am I spending enough time with my kids?” he would ask himself. “Am I giving them everything they need?”
He hopes that earning a diploma from McDaniel will quiet those questions. After all, during the uncertain months when Mr. Shriver and his wife contemplated moving thousands of miles away to enroll in college under a brand-new federal program, they knew one thing: “We wanted to set an example for our children,” Mr. Shriver says.
By 8 o’clock, the valley is hushed. The windows of the farmhouse shine in the fading daylight. Downstairs, in a large room the father and children share, Mr. Shriver sits on the couch, an iPhone pressed to his ear as he talks to his wife, in Alaska. Miles leans against his father’s leg, eyes glued to the TV screen, where an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie plays.
Mr. Shriver strokes the boy’s head. Rory, meantime, has snuggled deep into the big bed in the corner, watching the screen in silence.
Finally, Ron Shriver yawns.
