Veterans in Higher Education: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching to Campus

Abstract

[...]Cook and Kim do not address sample bias in their study exposing the possibility that those institutions with existing programming for student veterans may be overrepresented in their sample. Despite these shortcomings, DiRamio and Jarvis advance five areas developed from their exploratory factor analysis (EFA) as prescriptive to all institutions (p. 112): financial matters, administrative and strategic planning, advising and career services, psychological counseling, and a veterans' office on campus.

David DiRamio and Kathryn Jarvis. Veterans in Higher Education: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching to Campus. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 144 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN: 978-1-1181- 5079-5.

David DiRamio and Kathryn Jarvis of Auburn University have contributed this volume for the ASHE Higher Education Report Series, one of the first books dedicated to the student experiences of veterans. I approached this book as a veteran with more than 20 years of active duty service and numerous deployments, including Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and as a doctoral student researching the impact of college on student veterans.

Veterans in Higher Education offers seven chapters of theoretical opinion and research as useful information for "helping professionals," as DiRamio and Jarvis call us (p. 8), for considering student veterans and developing programming to enhance the success of this growing population. Unfortunately, the volume is difficult to navigate as the chapters are not numbered, but instead have kitschy academic phrases for chapter headings.

The best aspect of this book is the commentary of various experts at the end of the first six chapters. Alexander Astin, Margaret Baechtold, Marcia Baxter Magolda, John Braxton, Linda Reisser, and Nancy Schlossberg offer perspectives and honest appraisals of research on student veterans which may inform good practices for serving the student veteran population. For example, the chapter on women veterans is uneven with flawed assumptions and a strong negative description of the plight of women in the military followed by a rationale for how women veterans develop the characteristics necessary to succeed in college (p. 79). However Baechtold, an Air Force veteran, saves the chapter by providing an informed perspective on women veterans with comments such as "Nothing alienates a female veteran more than seeing staffautomatically ask about or recognize military service of men but assume that because they are women, they are not veterans" (p. 80). Despite this instance of a veteran's perspective, the greatest weakness of this book is that it lacks evidence of an informed veteran's perspective in most areas.

This work reflects the consensus that student veterans are nontraditional students. However, much of the current research on student veterans retreats to Tinto's work (1975) on traditional student departure, including DiRamio and Jarvis. The "Transitions 2.0" chapter highlights numerous empirical rationales that convincingly suggest Tinto's theories are not appropriate for researching student veterans, such as insufficiency for modeling student attrition (p. 36).

Despite this acknowledgement, DiRamio and Jarvis use Tinto's model, reinforcing its inefficacy, and do not address the implications of this incongruity in their theory. For example, they demonstrate that students who connect comfortably only with like-minded peers are at risk of departure (p. 35) yet rationalize the creation of a student veteran office that facilitates connecting veterans largely with other veterans only. The authors frequently cite research emphasizing the link for traditional students between social integration and persistence and inappropriately use it as a contributor to student veteran persistence (p. 47) despite acknowledging veterans as nontraditional students.

The recent student veteran literature also relies heavily on Schlossberg's transition theory (1981), which was designed for understanding general transitions of adults without a specific context such as higher education or veteran experiences. DiRamio and Jarvis elaborate with mixed success on DiRamio's earlier work, which also used Schlossberg's 4S theory. In light of Schlossberg's comments about using experienced group leaders to facilitate veteran transitions (p. 19), it is surprising that the authors do not connect DiRamio, Ackerman, and Mitchell's (2008) work in which they suggest that a transition coach may help student veterans (p. 93, Fig. 2). Moving away from the deficit modeling of Tinto and Schlossberg, scholars might also explore student veteran success, rather than presume veterans are failing, an assumption for which they provide no empirical evidence.

Discerning readers may notice that DiRamio and Jarvis seem to portray various services, such as student veterans' organizations and offices, as panaceas for veteran success. Yet, again, the book provides no empirical evidence to support such a claim. Further, the suggestion that higher education institutions can have a direct impact on student veteran success merely by creating certain programs demonstrates the lack of veteran perspective evident throughout the book. Participatory theory and the theory of self-authorship insist that student veterans should primarily determine their path under the tutelage of someone who understands veterans, or who is a veteran, and who possibly has a background in counseling.

DiRamio and Jarvis see their work as prescriptive for scholars and practitioners (e.g., pp. 6, 114). While this is an overstatement, Baxter Magolda's concept of self-authorship explored in the sixth chapter shows great promise. The authors astutely observe the potential that faculty and administrators have to influence student veteran success, claiming that we "are in a unique position to offer a classroom-based developmental approach to dealing with veterans' transition issues that is both educational and scholarly" (p. 90). While this is easier said than done, self-authorship may be a concept to explore further for serving student veterans in transition.

Baxter Magolda's commentary speaks to an expectation we should have in higher education- that veterans may bring a greater capacity to manage dissonance than the average student (p. 91). This is the first indication I have seen in the literature suggesting that we should expect successful transitions from student veterans. Baxter Magolda's comments also represent the greatest departure from the authors' perspectives in that she suggests student veterans should determine their own path in college.

This book veers dramatically offcourse in the seventh chapter in which the authors undertake a secondary data analysis of Cook and Kim's (2009) study documenting services offered for student veterans. Cook and Kim's study, while useful for some descriptive statistics, offers no definition of "veteran friendliness" and does not offer empirical evidence that the areas emphasized in their study contribute to student veteran success (p. 1). While some of these areas may be anecdotally valid, Cook and Kim do not establish causality for any student veteran services; they merely document services present at sample institutions. Further, the study had an institutional response rate of 17%, arguably making the sample not representative of all institutions. Further, two- and four-year public institutions are overrepresented and private for-profit institutions are underrepresented in the sample.

Finally, Cook and Kim do not address sample bias in their study exposing the possibility that those institutions with existing programming for student veterans may be overrepresented in their sample. This bias suggests that statistics describing services for veterans are inflated, a conclusion of concern, as services for student veterans are alarmingly low, according to Cook and Kim's study. Despite these shortcomings, DiRamio and Jarvis advance five areas developed from their exploratory factor analysis (EFA) as prescriptive to all institutions (p. 112): financial matters, administrative and strategic planning, advising and career services, psychological counseling, and a veterans' office on campus.

Several guest experts in Veterans in Higher Education suggest the positive influence that faculty can have on student veterans, and the higher education literature is replete with evidence that faculty may have a significant influence on all students due to frequency of contact. Despite this dynamic, Cook and Kim's (2009) study does not consider faculty interactions with student veterans, preventing DiRamio and Jarvis from including it in their EFA. When DiRamio and Jarvis suggest that a veterans' service office benefits veterans (without empirical evidence) yet do not include faculty as a key influencing factor, the legitimacy of these five factors comes into question.

This book typifies early scholarly efforts on behalf of student veterans in that it may be difficult for concerned professionals without a substantial veteran perspective to derive practical suggestions from it. The authors frequently reinforce negative stereotypes of veterans by referring repeatedly to Hollywood's The Hurt Locker, overstating statistics on veteran disabilities (pp. 38, 110), and highlighting a community college student veteran's graphic essay, even though these instances are not representative of student veterans in my experience. The authors' theoretical model reveals a potential association between Tinto's theorized importance of institutional commitment for student retention and the concept of veteran friendliness, yet the authors do not make this connection.

The difficulty most professionals will have in finding trustworthy information in this book makes this offering, in my view, one that should not be central to influencing policy, practice, or research into the experiences of student veterans on the contemporary college campus.

References

References

Cook, B., & Kim, Y. (2009). From soldier to student: Transition programs for service members on campus. Santa Monica, CA: Rand.

DiRamio, D., Ackerman, R., & Mitchell, R. (2008). From combat to campus: Voices of studentveterans. NASPA Journal, 45(1), 73-102.

Schlossberg, N, (1981). A model for analyzing human adaptation to transitions. Counseling Psychologist, 9(2), 2-18.

Tinto, V. (1975). Dropout from higher education: A theoretical synthesis of recent research. The Review of Educational Research, 45, 89-125.