When Jose Roman enrolled at Old Dominion University in the spring of 2012, he thought he would find more services for veterans on the campus than he did.
Fresh off a deployment to Afghanistan—his final mission in a 22-year career with the Navy and Navy Reserve—Mr. Roman soon linked up with other veterans, and they pushed for a meeting space as well as an orientation just for students affiliated with the military. They succeeded on both fronts.
The Norfolk, Va., campus, he says, has become a more welcoming place for veterans. They now have their own faculty adviser, a small office, and a Student Veterans of America chapter, of which Mr. Roman, 40, is president. Last month the university held a conference for student veterans from around the state.
More and more colleges are recognizing veterans as a distinct demographic group, with specific needs. As those students become more visible, they are finding one another with greater ease, pressing for better support services, and raising the bar for what is expected of colleges.
“Five years ago, it was perfectly OK to say, ‘Thank you for your service’ and ‘We’re a veteran-friendly school,’” says Mr. Roman, who attended other institutions before Old Dominion, and has been working toward a bachelor’s degree for more than a decade. In the past 12 months, he has seen more of an effort on his campus—and, to varying degrees, around the state—to articulate the kinds of services and policies that can help veterans succeed.
That shift is evident elsewhere, too. For the first year or two after the Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect, in 2009, many institutions scrambled to respond to an influx of veterans who were using the federal program to go to college. Today the GI Bill represents an investment of $34-billion and counting—and officials in Washington, as well as on campuses around the country, are re-examining what will help it yield the greatest returns.
The government has taken greater interest in how colleges respond to veterans, issuing guidance and expanding federally funded counseling services on campuses. Major research projects are under way to gather better data on how student veterans perform academically—including how many graduate. On campuses, programs and policies for student veterans are becoming better coordinated.
Significant challenges remain, however. The processing time for veterans’ federal educational benefits has been unpredictable, prompting some to take out loans to cover the gaps between housing-allowance payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The overall cost of attendance also causes headaches for many veterans. In several states, and in Congress, advocates are pushing lawmakers to pass legislation granting in-state tuition rates to all veterans, whose residency status is not always clear-cut.
Although the GI Bill is still a work in progress, it has opened a new door to higher education for a generation of veterans. And many federal officials are bragging about it.
Last month, just before Veterans Day, the department marked a milestone in the program’s history. In a teleconference with reporters, Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and a longtime community-college professor, introduced Steven Ferraro, an Army veteran from Staten Island, N.Y., who studies communications at New Jersey’s Middlesex County College. The father of three, who served a tour in Iraq in 2008, was the one-millionth recipient of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits.
‘Alphabet Soup’
Rod Davis has a clear-cut assessment of the growing federal interest in student veterans. “Everybody wants to get in on the action,” says Mr. Davis, who is director of veterans’ support for the Texas A&M University system.
He ticks off a list of federal agencies that have weighed in on how colleges can ensure that their veterans do well. The VA has expanded its campus-based counseling program. The Department of Education has helped push for more campus policies that help veterans. The Departments of Defense and Labor have, with mixed results, tried to smooth the path from military service to college.
“It’s an alphabet soup these days,” Mr. Davis says.
In August, President Obama announced a collaboration between the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs called “8 Keys to Success.” The program’s purpose: Encourage colleges to adopt policies and use tools that promote the educational success of veterans, military students, and their families. (More than 250 colleges have signed on.) Recently, the VetSuccess on Campus program—in which the VA places counselors directly on campuses—has expanded to 94 colleges from 32.
Congress, too, is looking out for student veterans. Lawmakers are considering legislation that would give veterans priority enrollment and improved academic counseling from the VA.
Another bill, introduced in the Senate in June, would permanently protect the term “GI Bill,” which the VA has registered as a trademark. Last year President Obama issued an executive order directing the agency to confront the “deceptive and misleading” promotional tactics of some institutions to attract veterans. Some websites, like “useyourGIBill.us,” required visitors to submit contact information that would generate “leads,” or contacts, for colleges.
Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office has supplied additional research on student veterans, issuing two reports since the spring. In one, the independent research agency recommended that the VA should provide more guidance to colleges.
Mr. Davis, of Texas A&M, welcomes the attention from Washington.
“If you know that the White House and Congress, as well as the alphabet agencies, are interested in this, then I think it’s easier to develop support within your own campus,” he says. “You can go find backup.”
Expanded Research
As the number of GI Bill recipients has grown, calls for better research on veterans have become louder. How do they fare in class? Do they graduate? What support services are most effective?
Some answers are on the way. Last month Google announced that it would provide $3.2-million to finance national research to assess veterans’ academic performance and determine what kinds of campus-based programs help them the most. The first wave of results is expected early next year.
Last month, two other reports provided early glimpse.
An analysis by the American Council on Education, examining data from the 2012 National Survey of Student Engagement, provided a demographic snapshot of military students, including student veterans. Their average age is 33, nearly 62 percent are first-generation students, and nearly three-quarters reported that their institutions “often” or “very often” provided them with the support they needed to succeed academically. Yet roughly two-thirds said their colleges helped them cope with their nonacademic responsibilities only “sometimes” or “never.”
Operation College Promise, an organization that helps colleges create veteran-specific services, examined data on undergraduate student veterans at 23 brick-and-mortar colleges that have taken part in its training programs. Support services, it found, help student veterans earn solid grade-point averages and stay enrolled.
Wendy A. Lang, the organization’s director, says she hopes the findings will convince other colleges that designating a gathering space for veterans, for instance, or offering them priority registration helps them make the best use of their federal benefits.
Five years into the GI Bill, Ms. Lang says she has seen a crucial change. “People call here all the time and say, ‘I’m the new veterans’ coordinator on campus.’ That position did not exist before.” It’s evidence, she believes, of how higher education, often described as a rigid industry, can be flexible.
Although Operation College Promise has trained campus officials from a couple hundred institutions on how best to serve their veterans, that’s just a start. “There are thousands of schools out there,” Ms. Lang says. “They still need help.”
