As David Salsone planned to leave the Navy several years ago and enroll in college on the Post-9/11 GI Bill, his supervisor in Bahrain mocked him.
“Where do you think you’re going, Salsone?” he would say. “Harvard?”
Mr. Salsone, a petty officer second class, kept quiet. “Maybe,” he remembers thinking. “Or someplace just as good.”
After six years in the Navy, Mr. Salsone, who had enlisted straight out of high school, went back to his native Long Island. Nobody in his family had gone to college. The prospect of an elite education felt promising—he knew he wanted it—but also out of reach.
The expected path for veterans of the enlisted ranks who want to use the GI Bill, some say, is: Go home, find a community college, an online for-profit, or maybe a regional university. The expensive places with their antimilitary culture, such thinking goes, aren’t for us. When one student now at Brown told her Air Force friends she’d been accepted, they joked that she’d get spit on. “We just all had this impression that they hated the military,” she says.
About 16 percent of veterans use the GI Bill to attend private institutions, roughly the same proportion as students generally. But at the most highly selective colleges, veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill barely fill a single classroom—38 at Penn, 22 at Cornell, and at Princeton, just one. The sparse numbers don’t go unnoticed, veterans say. Leaders of such institutions, meantime, are wrestling with how actively they should or could recruit veterans to their campuses.
After World War II, roughly two million veterans went to college on the original GI Bill, which was credited with democratizing higher education in the United States. More than half of them attended private institutions. “Why go to Podunk College,” Time magazine asked, “when the Government will send you to Yale?”
On some campuses, veterans accounted for the majority of students. Of course, times were different then: A far broader portion of the population had served in the military, and enrollment in higher education was considerably lower. Now veterans are a much smaller slice of the student demographic, representing about 3 percent of undergraduates.
Decades ago, some educators wondered about veterans’ place at elite colleges. In the 1940s, the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant—who himself had served in World War I—warned that the GI Bill might result in “the least capable among the war generation ... flooding the facilities for advanced education.” He later recanted and spoke glowingly of the federal program. But even now the question lingers: In the collegiate landscape, where do veterans belong?
James Wright, president emeritus of Dartmouth College and author of Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them (PublicAffairs, 2012), is disappointed that the Ivy League in particular hasn’t taken a stronger lead in recruiting veterans. Elite colleges, he argues, should view veterans no differently than they do prospective students from other underrepresented groups. The GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program are meant to give veterans the financial means to go to the best institutions they can get into, he says: “We need to make certain the door is as open as it can be.”
Several times a year, Mr. Wright—a historian who enlisted in the Marines at 17—visits military hospitals near Washington and urges service members to consider college. Aim high, he says.
For Mr. Salsone, that kind of encouragement came from his girlfriend, a Harvard alumna, who suggested the veteran expand his college search and consider the Ivy League. “I don’t know who’s supposed to go to those schools,” he had told her, “but it’s not me.”
He soon embraced the idea, though, and in 2009, enrolled here at Brown University. He was the first student admitted under the Yellow Ribbon Program, in which the federal government matches institutional aid beyond the benefits provided by the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The program is meant to make private colleges more affordable to veterans. But word has been slow to trickle down to the enlisted ranks, and many veterans still write off elite colleges as far too costly.
In his time at Brown, Mr. Salsone has pushed administrators to appeal to more talented veterans, and to make clear that there are financial resources available to them. Elsewhere, some elite colleges are trying to recruit more veterans through community colleges, nonprofit groups that identify high-achieving minority students, and information sessions at military installations. Columbia University, in particular, has attracted hundreds of veterans to its School of General Studies. (See article on Page A8.)
The efforts come as attitudes toward military service in general seem to be changing on some campuses. A few Ivy League institutions have reinstated Reserve Officer Training Corps units, which in some places had been banned since the Vietnam War, or more recently because of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality. Several liberal-arts colleges have established partnerships with nearby military academies—Vassar College with West Point, Colorado College with the Air Force Academy, and St. John’s College with the Naval Academy—to help students find common ground.
When Mr. Salsone, 28, started at Brown, he was one of three veterans. In his time here, he rowed crew, interned at an investment bank, and won a universitywide leadership award. Last month, he finished as one of six, graduating with a degree in economics.
Veterans bring a valuable perspective, he says, but few will naturally find their way here. He did, he says, “only because somebody else told me it was an option, and that I could do it.”
‘My Golden Ticket’
A couple of months ago, Mr. Salsone heard from an old Navy buddy, Troy Barrett. Mr. Barrett, who’d earned an associate degree while in the service and got out last year, had learned his friend was studying economics at Brown. He was impressed.
“Dammit, Soup,” Mr. Barrett recalls saying on the phone, using the other man’s nickname from the Navy. “Now you’ve got me thinking I can go to an Ivy League school!”
After nine years in the Navy, Mr. Barrett, 29, plans to pursue a bachelor’s degree. A visit to the University of California at Berkeley, where he met several smart, driven veterans, he says, shifted his sights.
“I fell in love with the idea of attending a top-ranked university,” says Mr. Barrett, who is now applying to Brown and Columbia and thinking about Berkeley for graduate school. “I didn’t want to waste my time or my golden ticket of the GI Bill at a community college.”
Now that more than 817,000 veterans have used the new GI Bill to go to college, some campus leaders and many veterans insist that elite institutions can do a better job of identifying qualified applicants. In 2009, when the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs unveiled the Yellow Ribbon Program, thousands of colleges rushed to sign on, eager to show their support for returning veterans. But on more than a few selective campuses, there was a surprise in the years that followed: Few veterans applied.
Recently, colleges have gotten better at identifying talented students in unlikely places. The military—with installations across the globe and a distinct lingo and culture—presents a different challenge, but one that colleges should take on, advocates say.
Officials at Brown haven’t done a very good job, acknowledges Jim Miller, dean of admissions here. “Our own veterans have pointed it out to us on occasion that we haven’t been as aggressive as we should be,” he says. “They’re right.”
In October, Mr. Salsone and a small group of administrators, faculty, and students submitted a lengthy report to the university on the recruitment and retention of student veterans. It offers 27 recommendations on admissions, financial aid, and support services, suggesting, for instance, that Brown up its ante in the Yellow Ribbon Program. The university currently offers $10,000 annually for each student, the report states, about $5,000 less than the maximum the VA allows. The report also calls for the university to strengthen its presence in military networks. Building a “critical mass” of veterans, it says, should be an institutional priority.
Other elite institutions, too, appear to be paying more attention to the newest generation of veterans. All Ivy League institutions and several selective liberal-arts colleges have joined with the Marine Corps Leadership Scholar Program to identify academically talented Marines. Yale University recently rolled out the Warrior-Scholar Project to help veterans make the transition to campus life. And last year, Harvard held what it described as its first-ever orientation for student veterans; the university’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, told the audience, “You will shape not only the future of Harvard but of the world.”
Travis Belanger, a junior at Harvard College who served as a Korean linguist in the Marine Corps, has been happy to see more effort. As co-president of Crimson Serves, a nonprofit group that supports Harvard veterans, Mr. Belanger says he is often called on to explain military terms to administrators. What does a deployment to Afghanistan say about somebody? (Cool under pressure, able to work with others, a self-starter.) Is the Defense Language Institute a big deal? (Yes.)
“They are working really hard,” Mr. Belanger says, “to do a better job.” Harvard College now enrolls three veterans, he says, with more in the Extension School; university officials declined to provide enrollment figures.
At Brown, Mr. Miller sees parallels between colleges’ new efforts to reach veterans and the stepped-up recruitment of first-generation students in the past decade. “It becomes apparent,” he says, “that there are cohorts of people that ought to have access to these places.”
‘You Belong Here’
Recent progress, some campus leaders say, should be just the beginning.
Colleges have been here before, says Catharine (Cappy) Bond Hill, president of Vassar. “Just like with low-income students or African-American students 30 or 40 years ago, you couldn’t just assume they were going to find you,” she says. “If you didn’t go looking for them, they weren’t going to end up in your pool.”
Last year Ms. Hill asked the Posse Foundation, which helps high-achieving, low-income students attend college, if it would connect veterans with elite liberal-arts colleges. The foundation agreed, and last month Vassar selected its first “posse” of 11 students. Ms. Hill hopes the model will prompt colleges like hers to learn more about who veterans are and what their experiences have been—and perhaps dispel some stereotypes.
Here at Brown, student veterans argue that the diversity they bring to the campus is just as valuable, and worth investing in, as socioeconomic or ethnic diversity is. When Mr. Salsone talks with fellow veterans who are considering college, he distills his thoughts on the matter to one simple statement: “You belong here.”
That idea has resonated with nonveteran students, too. One of them, Dorothy Lutz, used Mr. Salsone’s message as the title of a short documentary she produced on veterans at Brown.
Mr. Salsone remembers the moment, three years ago, when he really started to feel that he belonged.
Not long after arriving, he set out to explore Brown’s campus for the first time. The stately buildings, the tall trees—it was just what he’d imagined. But he also felt uncertain: Would there be any link here to his past?
As he walked across campus, an imposing structure caught his eye. Rising above the edge of Lincoln Field, along Thayer Street, the main drag of coffee shops and eateries, was an arch. Getting closer, he noticed the outstretched wings of an eagle along the upper curve of the white monument, with an inscription below: “To the men of Brown who in the World War gave their lives that freedom may endure.”
At once the campus became comfortable. Here was evidence, Mr. Salsone thought, of Brown’s military tradition. Even today, several years out of the Navy and poised to start a new career, he says the monument never fails to move him. He calls it “my arch.”
