In 2012, The Posse Foundation launched its Veterans Initiative in partnership with Vassar College. The Posse Foundation seeks out talented students who are often overlooked by traditional recruitment methods due to race, socioeconomic status or some other prohibitive factor. One of these barriers to entry in prestigious universities is being a veteran. Vassar, along with other elite institutions, is attempting to change that.
With Veterans Day just passed, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on what exactly our servicemen and women deserve, beyond our limitless gratitude and respect. According to the American Council on Education, there is a growing national trend of U.S. veterans entering college — over 920,000 veterans used their federal GI Bill in 2011, as opposed to only 560,000 in 2009. Logically, there should be an accompanying trend of veterans enrolling at prestigious institutions — schools ranked highly by US News and World Report — but data compiled by Inside Higher Education columnist Wick Sloane shows this is not the case.
In this school year, there are no undergraduate veterans enrolled at Williams, Sloane’s alma mater and the top-ranked liberal arts institution in the country. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, MIT and Cornell all likewise enroll fewer than five undergraduate veterans. This is problematic not only because we owe it to these veterans to provide a quality education if they want one, but also because it seems that veterans are choosing instead to enroll in private for-profit institutions in disproportionate amounts. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that 26 percent of veterans who used their GI Bill benefits from 2009-2012 enrolled in private for-profit institutions.
Though those institutions may hold value for certain veterans, depending on their aptitudes and their post-military career goals, they certainly cannot offer the same benefits as a prestigious public or private college. The educational experiences at these two kinds of schools will be strikingly different with regards to the students’ daily lives (for-profit institutions tend not to have a vibrant campus life or extracurriculars) and the accessibility of renowned faculty. If a traditional four-year program would serve a veteran best, then we need to give them the tools necessary to access that education.
Of course, institutions of higher learning are not actively trying to prevent veterans from applying or enrolling. The problem, it seems, is that many veterans remain completely unaware of the resources available to them, and elite universities seem more like a pipe dream than an achievable goal. Though the federal government does offer the GI Bill to returning veterans — which will cover all tuition and fees at a public university or the national maximum tuition set for private institutions — many veterans will not take advantage of this monetary resource. Additionally, participating in the recently implemented Yellow Ribbon Program, which calls upon the government to match any additional aid that colleges grant to their veteran students (up to $15,000 annually), is voluntary, and many schools, the College at the University among them, choose not to participate.
Along with traditional obstacles to entry, such as a lack of recruitment, lack of veterans’ services at institutions of higher learning and lack of information about how to access federal veterans benefits, there is also the presumption that veteran undergraduates are not welcome at these schools. One Air Force veteran at Brown University said, "We [veterans] just all had this impression that they hated the military.” Whether this impression was fair, there are certainly ways the University, along with other elite colleges, can seek to prove that our attitude toward veterans is not hostile.
There have been successes at appealing to veterans, such as at Georgetown University, which enrolled 81 veteran undergraduates this year. In addition to maintaining a full-time veterans office on campus, since 2010 they have assembled a Veterans Support Team of deans, faculty and students who meet regularly to assess the progress of veterans’ programs and their changing needs. There are no comparable programs at the University. Our resources for veteran undergraduates are sorely lacking. While both the Darden School and the Law School host CIOs that act as a support network for veterans, no such CIO currently exists for undergraduates.
Recruiting veterans to America’s top colleges is not only a matter of respect but of increasing the quality of every student’s educational experience. For as Vassar’s President Catharine Hill writes for the Huffington Post, “The result [of enrolling a more diverse class] is that our students and faculty note a richer exchange of ideas and a wider range of viewpoints from people with more varied experiences.”
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