Military veterans entering college were more likely than other students to express low confidence in their academic abilities and to report needing tutoring or remedial work, a study has found.
They were also more likely than nonveterans to report a range of other characteristics associated with subsequent failure to complete college. For example, a larger percentage of veterans reported that their parents had low incomes and education levels. And the veterans were less likely to engage educationally with faculty members or fellow students, according to the findings from two researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.
“I’m afraid there are any number of institutions that don’t know how to engage with this population or provide the services required in order for them to be successful,” including tutoring and remedial support, said on the report’s authors, José L. Santos, an assistant professor of higher education and organizational change.
Mr. Santos and the co-author, Dani Molina, a doctoral student in education, presented their results in late May at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research, in Toronto. Both men are veterans, which helped fuel their interest in examining what they described as an understudied group at a time when many men and women returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are considering attending college on the GI Bill.
The new findings came from the 2009 results of the annual survey of freshmen conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, which produces a nationally representative portrait of students entering college for the first time. The population in Mr. Santos and Mr. Molina’s study included a somewhat elite subset of all veterans because the UCLA survey is administered only to full-time students attending four-year institutions; Education Department data indicate that a large share of all veterans attend two-year institutions.
The findings confirm and expand on those about veterans from other sources, including results released in November from another broadly administered questionnaire, the National Survey of Student Engagement.
More Remediation Needed
Mr. Santos and Mr. Molina reported a number of statistically significant variations between veterans and nonveterans. Among the differences: 41 percent of the veterans had parents with low socioeconomic status—a composite measure of their parents’ income and education—compared with only 25 percent of the nonveterans.
Veterans were underrepresented among entering students who earned an average grade of A in high school and overrepresented among those with C and D averages.
Perhaps as a result, 20 percent of veterans reported receiving tutoring or remedial work in mathematics in the previous year, and 31 percent expected to need such help in college. The corresponding figures for nonveterans were 14 and 21 percent. Similar gaps were reported for writing, with more veterans reporting needs in that area as well.
What’s more, a larger proportion of veterans (41 percent) than of nonveterans (27 percent) reported low confidence on a measure of their own sense about their academic preparedness.
Veterans also were significantly less likely to engage with their instructors and fellow students. Forty percent of them expected to have low involvement in college life generally, compared with 26 percent of nonveterans. And 24 percent of veterans, in the fall of their freshman year, said they had not yet asked a faculty member for advice after class, compared with 13 percent of nonveterans.
The findings were based on responses from 730 veterans at 254 institutions in the UCLA survey’s national pool of more than 200,000 students. The researchers also examined responses from 1,542 randomly selected nonveterans in that pool to provide a statistically meaningful comparison group. Before the 2009 version of the survey, UCLA had not asked freshmen since 1992 whether they were veterans.
Mr. Santos and Mr. Molina plan to continue to use UCLA data to study veterans as they progress through college.
A Need for Tutoring
Mr. Santos, who served in the Marine Corps from 1987 to 1990 and in the Navy Reserve from 1990 to 1993, said his own experience in the military underscores the value of extra academic help for those who have served.
He attended a one-year academic preparatory program as part of an officer-candidate program before enrolling at the University of Arizona, from which he graduated in three and a half years. The preparation helped him improve what he acknowledges were deficiencies in his high-school preparation. Without that help, he says, “I don’t think I would be at UCLA today.”
The survey results, Mr. Santos says, indicate that there are many veterans like him who would benefit from attention tailored to them and their educational needs. That is especially important as the government puts more money into educating veterans; the G. Bill that was enacted in 2009 provides more-generous educational benefits than its predecessor did. Without such attention, he says, “the investment we are making on those folks can get lost.”
A 2009 report sponsored by the American Council on Education and other organizations found that only about one-third of 723 colleges and universities surveyed offered academic-support and tutoring programs specifically for veterans. Colleges had developed other programs to help veterans but needed to publicize them better, the report concluded.
