Veterans of World War II who went to college on the GI Bill tend to sound awestruck when they describe earning a degree on Uncle Sam’s dime. Theirs, after all, was a personal transformation with profound impact: The windfall of college graduates in the postwar decade—more than two million GI’s enrolled in college—helped create the modern middle class and catapulted American society into the knowledge age.
At this moment, a new migration is under way from the military to the college campus. More than half a million veterans who served after September 11, 2001, were enrolled in college classes last year under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Thousands more are expected in the coming years as roughly two million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan return home. Though their passage through the college gates might not have the same sweeping effect it did on the post-World War II generation, optimism is running strong that the successful transition of today’s veterans to higher education—and gainful employment beyond—might be a balm for a nation nervous about its economic future.
Out of Uniform
As veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pursue college, The Chronicle begins a series on what that means for higher education, the economy, and the students themselves.
Behind the Benefits
The Post-9/11 GI Bill, Explained
More on the GI Bill
Graphics: How Students and Colleges Profit
State-by-State Map: Where Veterans Get Benefits
Photos
Laura Segall for The Chronicle
Institutions are scrambling to adapt to a recent surge in veteran enrollment as more than 500,000 former service members cash in on the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Here, veterans gather in the Veterans Lounge at Scottsdale Community College, in Arizona.
Margaret Bourke-White, Time Life Pictures, Getty Images
World War II veterans in college on the original GI Bill accounted for 60 percent of all students at the U. of Iowa in 1947. A modern GI Bill aims to give today’s veterans a similar shot at college.
The influx stems from that post-9/11 law that provides veterans with the most-comprehensive education benefits since the original 1944 GI Bill. Their presence has spurred many colleges, some with more fervor than others, to create veteran-specific programs and services.
Yet the adjustment has not been altogether smooth, and nearly three years into the Post-9/11 GI Bill, veterans and colleges are still getting acquainted, with mixed results.
Over the next few months, The Chronicle will explore the growing population of veterans who are hanging up their uniforms and becoming college students: who they are and what paths they’ve traveled to the campus, as well as their aspirations, struggles, and triumphs once they get there. We will examine how colleges, which are often the conduit for veterans’ transitions back to civilian life, are meeting the needs of this unique group of students.
In our series, Out of Uniform, we will also examine the impact of the latest GI Bill on higher education and on our faltering economy. As it turns out, many of today’s debates echo decades-old concerns about next steps for returning war veterans. During the early years of the original GI Bill, just as now, Congress fretted over the prospect of proprietary institutions cashing in on veterans’ education benefits. And there were doubts that veterans—many of them first-generation college students—could handle universities’ academic rigor. At one point, the president of Harvard declared that only a “carefully selected group” of veterans belonged in the hallowed halls of academe. (He later retreated, deeming the GI Bill a “heartening sign” of social mobility.)
But there are key distinctions this time around. In 1947, exactly half of American college students were veterans. Today, Post-9/11 GI Bill recipients are a tiny minority in an expansive college universe, making up only 3 percent of American undergraduates. They also live in a society where very few people have connections to the military: The Pew Research Center recently found that only one-half of 1 percent of American adults have ever served on active duty. That unfamiliarity, student veterans say, sometimes breeds stereotypes—about why they enlisted, their political or ideological beliefs, and what they did while in uniform.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, student veterans commonly report feeling isolated, from both fellow veterans and anybody remotely familiar with military culture. And they often feel at odds with younger classmates. The maturity gap, some veterans say, can lead to awkward or tense exchanges. The question they resent most is: “Did you kill anyone?” But they’ve learned to brace for it all the same.
As more veterans arrive on campus, the learning curve has proved steep for everyone involved. And some surprises have emerged—in the contours of the GI Bill, the depth of the wars’ emotional impact, and the tenacity of cultural biases. In Maryland a former marine slept on friends’ couches—and sometimes in his car—during a recent semester break, when an unexpected gap in benefits ground his housing allowance to a halt. In Utah a prominent scholar was shocked to complete a national study on student veterans’ emotional adjustment and find that nearly half had contemplated suicide. In California an administrator at a prestigious university advises anxious prospective students that checking the box marked “veteran” on their applications will not, contrary to their fears, jeopardize their chances of acceptance.
Today’s veterans are difficult to characterize. Some have been to college before. Many haven’t. Some are married, with families; others are only a few years older than the “traditional” freshmen they sit next to in class.
One experience they all share is having served in uniform during a period of protracted military conflicts. But even that gets complicated. For starters, not all veterans were in combat. Not all served in Iraq or Afghanistan. A deployment to Djibouti, for instance, is also part of what the Department of Defense deems the global war on terror. So is service in the Philippines, or in Romania on the shores of the Black Sea.
Not all veterans view their service, or the people they served with, in the same way. Some actively seek out the company of fellow vets, relieved to stumble upon a like-minded group at an off-campus bar. Others, particularly women, who make up roughly 8 percent of veterans, tend to play down their status or don’t mention it at all.
The aftermath of their wartime experiences is different, too. There are those who struggle mightily with post-traumatic stress, fallout from traumatic brain injuries, or slow-healing wounds. But many more make the transition smoothly and go on to thrive on campus and beyond. For colleges to acknowledge those problems but not overstate them, officials say, is a persistent challenge.
Whatever veterans’ characteristics, higher education, perhaps more than any other business, has a stake in their success. The cost of failure is high: Federal unemployment statistics show that male and female veterans between 18 and 34 are at greater risk for joblessness than their civilian peers. This hazard is particularly acute for female veterans, who are more likely than their male counterparts to be single parents.
At this early point in the life span of the Post-9/11 GI Bill—which took effect in August 2009—research is thin on how the newest student veterans are faring in college. A pilot study, by the Pat Tillman Foundation and Operation College Promise, of veterans at seven public institutions with large veteran enrollments recently found that their retention rates and grade-point averages were higher, on average, than those of their traditional peers. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, meanwhile, began collecting veterans’ graduation rates from colleges just last fall.
The Post-9/11 GI Bill’s broad scope is intended to ease veterans’ day-to-day concerns about how to pay for college or attend full time. A veteran who is eligible for the full allotment of benefits, for instance, can receive 36 months of tuition up to the cost of the most-expensive public college in his state. The program also provides a housing allowance and a stipend for books. That means an Army veteran who lives in San Antonio, Tex., who has a family, and whose rank while on active duty fell somewhere in the middle of the pay grade for enlisted soldiers—say, sergeant—would receive a housing allowance of $1,362 a month. (In Queens, N.Y., where the cost of living is much higher, a veteran in the same situation would receive $2,835.)
Still, beyond the daily concerns of rent and textbooks are broader questions of access. Are the federal benefits generous enough for veterans to have a fair shot at any college? Or do their finances and other life responsibilities channel them into certain types of institutions, exposing the grooves of stratification within academe?
So far, most veterans—like most students of any stripe—have landed at public institutions. Of those, many are at community colleges. But another large chunk are at for-profit colleges, which draw about 13 percent of all college students nationally but have attracted far higher proportions of veterans. In California, for instance, which has the largest number of Post-9/11 GI Bill recipients in the country, half of student veterans attend community colleges, while a third attend proprietary institutions.
Nationally, about a quarter of veterans getting benefits under the Post-9/11 GI Bill attend for-profit institutions, which have collected more than $1.6-billion under the federal program since 2009. That figure has riled some members of Congress, who complain that some for-profit institutions aggressively recruit veterans only to award them degrees of questionable worth.
The benchmark for veterans’ success will very likely be their employability. The aim of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, after all, is to give veterans a college education and train them to be valuable workers in a highly skilled labor force. That’s not unlike the aspirations of the original GI Bill, which was partly a gesture of a grateful nation but also an attempt to stave off the potentially disastrous impact of millions of jobless war veterans.
Those GI’s went on to become the Greatest Generation. Today’s student veterans will leave a legacy, too. Colleges will help determine what it will be.
