Colleges Face Challenges With Influx of Military Veterans

UPDATE
For Veterans' Day, I asked students at Valencia College what professors could do to help them enter into the next part of their lives after combat. Here's what they had to say.





Colleges Face Challenges With Influx of Military Veterans

By Sandra G. Boodman
NOV 29, 2011
This story was produced in collaboration with

When Brian Hawthorne enrolled at George Washington University as a 23-year-old junior after two tours in Iraq, the former Army medic was unprepared for the adjustment.

"I felt like I was on another planet," he said of his first semester in 2008. Hawthorne recalled feeling whipsawed by the abrupt transition of "going from an environment where people around you are dying every day and trying to kill you" to a campus where he was surrounded by people who didn't know anyone in the military.

Academics provided no refuge. "I was very worried because I couldn't concentrate," said Hawthorne, who had graduated near the top of his Westchester County, N.Y., high school class. "I would read one page and forget what I'd just read." In danger of flunking out, he sought help on campus and was referred to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the District, where doctors quickly diagnosed a mild traumatic brain injury caused by his proximity to bomb blasts.

Hawthorne's experience is emblematic of the challenges — social, academic, psychological and medical — facing the rapidly growing population of veterans who are flocking to colleges around the country, and the health demands placed on the schools they are attending.

Propelled by the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which took effect in 2009, 2 million veterans, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan, are eligible for generous benefits that can amount to a full scholarship. At George Mason University, Virginia's largest public school with more than 32,000 students, for example, the number of veterans has almost doubled, from 840 in 2009 to 1,575 last spring.


also

Vets on Campus Face Unique Challenges
November 29, 2011
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS -- Army veteran Ben Miller remembers the isolation he felt when he enrolled at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in the fall of 2009.

"I would show up on campus, talk to absolutely no one and go home," said Miller, 27, who did three tours in Iraq as a counterintelligence specialist. "I didn't feel like I really belonged."

With wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down and enhancements to the GI Bill, colleges and universities are expecting a surge in veteran enrollment unseen since World War II.

But some academics and veterans' advocates are warning that many colleges are unprepared to deal with the unique needs of former service members. Many veterans face a difficult transition to civilian life, ranging from readjustment issues to recovery from physical and mental injuries.

And they say without special attention, many will fail to graduate.

"If colleges are not prepared to help transition Soldiers from combat you do run the risk of losing an entire generation," said Tom Tarantino of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "The GI Bill isn't a thank you for your service. What it really is is a readjustment benefit. It is giving them the opportunity to do something that is constructive for their mind and their body, that gives them a mission and allows them to move forward in life. It's a backstop so you're not walking right off the plane from combat in to the civilian world. It was designed to be a soft landing."
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