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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...