Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education

Jan Arminio, Tomoko Kudo Grabosky, Josh Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317810551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education bridges theory to practice in order to better prepare practitioners in their efforts to increase the success of veteran and military service members in higher education. Bringing together perspectives from a researcher, practitioner, and student veteran, this unique author team provides a comprehensive but manageable text reviewing relevant research literature and presenting accessible strategies for working with students. This book explores the facilitators and barriers of student veteran learning and engagement, how culture informs the current student veteran experience, and best practices for creating and maintaining a campus that allows for the success of these students. The latest to publish in the Key Issues on Diverse College Students series, this volume is a valuable resource for student affairs and higher education professionals to better serve veteran and military service members in higher education.

1 Historical Context of Student Veterans and Service Members

DOI: 10.4324/9781315816418-1

Though most educators are at least somewhat familiar with the basic concept of the GI Bill benefits after World War II, this chapter seeks to familiarize readers with the long but inconsistent tradition of veterans benefits, how and when those benefits included education, the role of veterans themselves in advocating to receive promised benefits, how those benefits were often used for other government interests besides compensation for sacrifices made, and the evolving nature of the relationship between the military and higher education. The discussion of these historical topics provides context and precedent for this generation of SVSM and can prove useful in preventing injustices in the distribution of benefits.

A “Milestone” Beginning

Veterans were first granted benefits for serving in the Continental Army after the American Revolution. Passed in 1818, the Revolutionary War Pension Act provided benefits for both officers and the enlisted who found themselves in dire financial circumstances. These veterans had to have served at least nine months and had to swear that they were in need of assistance. According to Resch (1982), In fact, Resch concluded that this was the largest federal relief legislation until the 1900s. His research into the beneficiaries and their children indicated significant higher quality of life outcomes for those who received the benefit as compared with those veterans’ children in similar circumstances whose fathers did not receive any benefits. The impact of land as a benefit was particularly beneficial to poor veterans of the American Revolution (Alexander & Thelin, 2013).

Historians have correctly identified this act as a milestone. It shattered nearly forty years of resistance against awarding lifetime pensions for completing military service. It created the first military pension plan and it set a precedent for later veterans programs. However, scholars have overlooked the act as the first federal effort to aid some of the nation’s poor.

(p. 172)

Resch (1982) noted a mix of purposes in the 1818 Act. It encouraged patriotic feelings after the War of 1812 and “assuaged guilt for earlier injustices dealt Continental soldiers” (p. 20) such as unscrupulous recruiting tactics (e.g., kidnapping and theft to pay for substitutions), moving the Army to Valley Forge, and lacking the resources to pay soldiers. According to Holt (2002), some soldiers pressured George Washington to confiscate food from filled Pennsylvania barns to feed his soldiers, but he refused. Holt also related the anecdote of soldiers at Valley Forge receiving shoes too small for their feet, so the shoes were boiled for food.

Though informal in nature, Revolutionary War military chaplains found that teaching injured soldiers to read improved their morale. Hence, chaplains held classes teaching injured soldiers to read the Bible (Persyn & Polson, 2012). Note that these efforts were not directly related to soldiers’ duties.

Establishing Precedent

Veterans of the War of 1812 organized “Jacksonian mass lobbying” efforts (Oberly, 1985, p. 38) to receive comparable land benefits to those Mexican War veterans received. Due to acquiring vast land from Mexico, and eagerness to populate those lands with U.S. citizens, the U.S. government granted Mexican War veterans 160 acres under the Ten Regiments Act of 1847. Veterans of the War of 1812 had received no such land grants. Though their efforts were eventually successful, massive organizing was required of various local, state, and regional veterans groups including the Veterans Corp of 1812 in New York. Holding both state and national conventions, petition drives, marches on Washington, and even advocating at funerals for equal benefits were common tactics (Oberly, 1985). These efforts coalesced veterans across social class and political divides. Veterans from the War of 1812 argued that they were worthy of these benefits because they served nobly and this was an issue of equity with other war veterans. Politicians became increasingly supportive of the veterans’ demands because office holders needed votes from an electorate that was torn by issues of slavery and states’ rights.

According to Oberly (1985), the U.S. government awarded 177,000 1812 veterans, widows, and their heirs land grants in 1850 and 260,000 combined War of 1812 veterans and Mexican War veterans received warrants for land. It wasn’t necessarily the land that interested veterans and their families, but rather the money they could receive by selling the land to others. However, this legislation dealt only with land grants, not other types of compensation. Unfortunately, “all talk of a general pension for 1812 veterans was postponed until after the Civil War, and by that time the veterans of the old conflict were politically overshadowed by the veterans of a new one” (Oberly, 1985, p. 55).

In 1861, a year after the Civil War began, Congress passed the First Morrill Act of 1862 which gave federal land to each senator and representative’s state in Congress. Income derived from the sale of this land was to be invested in stock dividends which were to: Though the money raised was far less than expected (Alexander & Thelin, 2013), curricular mandates of military training were required of all male students (Shearer, 1979), and “not universally appreciated” (Alexander & Thelin, 2013, p. 4).

[c]onstitute a perpetual fund, the capital of which shall remain forever undiminished … and the interest of which shall be inviolably appropriated, by each State which may take claim the benefit of this act, to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as related to agriculture and the mechanical arts.

(First Morrill Act, 1862, SEC. 4)

Though teaching literacy in the American Revolutionary War was considered by chaplains to be a morale booster, in the Civil War such efforts by the Union Army were considered a military necessity. Enlisted soldiers who could not read and write forced officers to conduct clerical work (Shaffer, 2004). African-American soldiers realized the advantages of literacy in their post-war lives and subsequently advocated to Union leaders to establish schools (Shaffer, 2004, p. 17). According to Shaffer (2004), As research on veterans benefits from the American Revolution demonstrated, the gains to quality of life for veterans and their heirs were also significant for African American soldiers who served in the Union Army. In addition to the financial benefits, other positive outcomes included training in fighting discriminatory practices in the Union Army, having some autonomy, having authority over White Southerners, and being a part of a noble cause (Shaffer, 2004). According to Shaffer (2004), Union veterans (Black and White) received three types of benefits: military claims, pensions, and access to federally funded veterans’ homes, though African-American veterans at first received less pay and had to work harder to receive their benefits. Some benefits (such as signing bonuses) were retroactive and could be gained only by petitioning the federal government, a cumbersome bureaucratic process. Nonetheless, such benefits allowed African-American veterans to buy land at a significantly greater rate than African-American non veterans. Because Union Army pensions were not dependent upon the veterans’ health (Costa, 1995), the cost to the government was tremendous and required significant lobbying by veterans. According to Costa, in 1862 Congress also established additional war-related disability pensions, depending upon the extent of the disability, but wealth was not a consideration. Then in 1890 Congress enacted an old-age pension for any veteran with a disability. Those veterans with a war-related disability received a higher pension. By 1910 Union veterans were collecting on average $171.90 per year. Because the Union Army pension was the only federal retirement program, receiving these pensions influenced veterans to leave the labor force before their non-veteran peers (Costa, 1995).

Officers with abolitionist leanings also encouraged the education of black soldiers because they believed that learning would help elevate African-American soldiers. Unfortunately, the Union army formulated no general policy to make educational opportunities available to all black soldiers who desired them. Still, a number of schools for African-American troops were established through the efforts of sympathetic white officers and Northern missionaries. Most of these efforts were aimed at recently liberated slaves, but schools also appeared in regiments composed of free men of color, such as the 55th Massachusetts Infantry and the 5th Massachusetts Heavy Artillery.

(p. 17)

Another means to compensate Civil War veterans for their sacrifice was the movement to provide education for veterans’ orphans. Due to the coalescing of the movements to provide public education with the concern of providing care for the deserving poor, some state governments initiated educational opportunities for Civil War orphans. Nowhere was the commitment to accommodate these children greater than in the state of Pennsylvania (Bair, 2011). In fact Pennsylvania supported such schools from 1864 until 2009. The schools were consolidated in 1893 to form the Orphans Industrial School, then renamed Scotland School for Veterans’ Children in 1951 (Bair, 2011). As noted by Bair (2011), the actions of Pennsylvania demonstrated “the tension inherent in all debates about child welfare, about state responsibility of the children of deceased and disabled veterans, and about the role of education in ameliorating society’s problems” (p. 463). However, the connections between education and the military were becoming much more a relationship of mutual dependency rather than purely acts of charity.

Becoming Bedfellows

The Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890 sought to increase the pragmatic nature of higher education. This included “the quest for sophisticated and advanced tools for warfare” (Alexander & Thelin, 2013, p. 9) and created ties between military research efforts and institutions in higher education. Whereas in the late 1890s the federal government had created and staffed its own facilities for research, it began to offer competitive research grants to research universities with sufficient resources and talent (Thelin, 2011). Studies on mustard gas, military training, the Manhattan Project, language, and cultural studies were early examples of military research conducted in conjunction with higher education. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are “contemporary legacies” of the financial support higher education received for military-related research (Alexander & Thelin, 2013, p. 10). However, the relationship of federal government as contractor with higher education would bring tensions to the government and higher education in subsequent decades.

Lessons of the Bonus Marchers

To quickly enhance a standing army, the Reserve Officers Training Corp (ROTC) was established in 1916 through the National Defense Act (Shearer, 1979). The first institution to offer a ROTC unit was the American Literacy, Scientific, and Military Academy in Norwich, Vermont (now Norwich University). However, ROTC students had reserved status and could not mobilize quickly. Today, ROTC programs provide a significant number of educated military officers that are “closely associated with civil society” (Alexander & Thelin, 2013, p. 6). But, in 1918, as a means to keep large numbers of active-status military personnel in college who were able to be sent to battle immediately, the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) was established within the Department of the Army as a part of the Selective Service Act of 1917 (Bower, 2004; Shearer, 1979). Shearer’s (1979) case-study research investigated how the SATC was experienced at the University of Illinois, Urbana, one of the 525 institutions involved in the program (Alexander & Thelin, 2013). According to Shearer, “Every higher education institution with more than one hundred able-bodied students eighteen years old and older could participate in the program” (p. 214). This allowed institutions whose student numbers were dwindling due to the World War I draft to keep some students and, because of a 12-week on-campus training program, it provided the military inexpensive preparation for officers. The War Department footed the room, board, housing, and training costs of the SATC members. However, the War Department did not pay the full cost of tuition.

In 1918, 3,000 students were inducted into the SATC at the University of Illinois, Urbana, along with 60 military support personnel. This military presence became ubiquitous. For example, all students were told to obey military discipline, including being punctual. Confusion over academic authority and the roles of civilian versus military personnel prompted lax attendance of SATC students in civilian taught classes. Curriculum assignments were determined by War Department needs rather than fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Historical Context of Student Veterans and Service Members
• 2 Cultural Context
• 3 Facilitators and Barriers to Success
• 4 Advocacy Model
• 5 Best Practices for Increasing Student Success
• 6 Student Veteran Cognitive and Identity Development
• 7 Equity Issues
• 8 Future Directions, Potential Challenges, and Conclusions
• References
• Appendix
• Index