Military Veterans

Underwhelming Force Link

(Re-published from PRISM | November 2016) Post-9/11 veterans were seen as a natural fit for engineering, based on their training and experience. Yet just a small fraction of returnees have joined the field. Why?

As a kid, John Filleau yearned to be a scientist, but the colleges he applied to from high school turned him down. So he went with Plan B: enlisting in the Air Force. “It was just good old-fashioned desperation,” he says. It also turned out to be a good career move. Enrolling in a community college while stationed in Florida, Filleau subsequently transferred to the University of West Florida. In between deployments to Iraq, a post-earthquake humanitarian mission in Haiti, and classified missions, he earned an electrical engineering degree, graduated debt-free with a 3.9 GPA, and now is pursuing a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University. “The military beat a work ethic into me,” he explains.

Filleau’s late-blooming talent would stand out on any campus. But the pathway he followed into engineering is one that a number of educators hoped would be widely adopted by veterans under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The combination of technical training, leadership experience, military discipline, and maturity gained from years of service seemed to make many veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars a natural fit for engineering. The result would be an expanded engineering workforce that was also more diverse, reflecting the relatively large proportion of minorities in the enlisted ranks.

Such hopes remain well short of fulfillment. Although more than 3.5 million veterans or dependents have tapped GI Bill benefits since 2011—costing taxpayers $11.1 billion in fiscal 2015 alone—a 2015 Syracuse University study found “significant barriers to realizing the potential individual and societal gains from our country’s massive investment in veterans’ education.” Some 43 percent of service members and veterans reported having a military specialization, job, or training related to science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). Yet just 10,153 have earned degrees in engineering or engineering-related fields since the Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect in 2009, according to the advocacy group Student Veterans of America. A 2015 SVA survey of 1,352 current students found that only 8.1 percent were pursuing engineering.

From Torrent to Trickle Link

“Universities in general have not been proactive about service members,” concludes Corrinne Zoli, lead researcher on the Syracuse study and director of the university’s Institute for National Security and Counterterrorism. While describing the veterans’ experience overall as “largely positive,” she drew a stark contrast with the welcome extended to post-World War II veterans, whose university studies under the GI Bill underpinned the prosperity of the 1950s, produced 450,000 engineers, and expanded the American middle class.

“Not enough of them are going into STEM-related fields,” says Susan Lord, chair and professor of electrical engineering at the University of San Diego, who is conducting a four-year study of veterans in engineering. Some vets may leave the military seeking the quickest route possible into the workforce, she says. Others may not understand what engineers do or think that “you have to be a genius to be an engineer.”

Slightly less than half of all eligible vets even use their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits, according to the SVA, which has 1,400 chapters on campuses nationwide. “Two thirds of student vets are first-generation college students. When people are transitioning out of the military, they may not have encouragement from relatives,” says SVA’s director of policy, Derek Fronabarger. Of those who do avail themselves of benefits, data show a wide gap between aspiration and achievement. Nearly a third of those surveyed by SVA in 2015 were pursuing a degree in science and engineering (25 percent when social sciences are excluded). Engineering was the third-most popular major behind business and health professions in the survey. But only 17.8 percent of completed degrees were in science and engineering fields, suggesting that student vets may start out in STEM programs but at some point change their major.

Vets are drawn to engineering for a number of reasons, including job prospects. “When [service members] are transitioning out, they’ll know they’ll have a skill that translates into the civilian workforce,” says Fronabarger. “For a four-year degree, engineering has great job opportunity, very good pay, and a lot of upward mobility.” Veterans with a security clearance are particularly sought after by defense contractors, says Joshua Pederson, who until recently was the program coordinator of Troops to Engineers at San Diego State University. He points to a freshman mechanical engineering major who was recently recruited by Northrop Grumman to work on the Air Force’s new bomber project in Melbourne, Florida.

Many expect their military training will give them a leg up. Veterans generally emerge from service with “pretty extensive technical training,” says Zoli. Depending on the service and occupational specialty, that could range from road-building to signals intelligence. The Air Force has particularly intensive training. Teamwork, often a necessary part of engineering practice, is essential to many military missions. A research team led by Laura Steinberg, then dean of engineering at Syracuse, noted in 2011 that many vets could be considered “pre-qualified” for taking engineering courses …

To read the full article, click below.

Underwhelming Force

(At left) INSCT Director of Research Corri Zoli discusses Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America with a group of military veterans at the 2016 Warrior Scholar Project “academic boot camp,” held at Syracuse University from July 9-17, 2016.

WSP holds camps such as this one on partner campuses throughout the summer. The purpose of the program is to re-orientate college-bound veterans toward academia, by introducing foundational texts, teaching college readiness skills, addressing misperceptions about college, and unlocking the academic potential of these former warriors, many of whom will have joined the forces directly from high school.

Zoli, who is chair of WSP’s Academic Advisory Board, notes that many of the more than three million US military veterans who have served in America’s longest wars to date have aspired to go to college after service. “The mission of the Warrior Scholar Project is to make sure that all enlisted veterans not only achieve this goal but thrive on college campuses,” she says. “There is no question that military servicemembers, including the women and men of the Gulf War and post-9/11 generation of war fighters, have much to offer America’s campuses, such as unprecedented military training, diverse jobs and professions from their deployments, and a spirit of teamwork, collaboration, and dedication to the greater community.”

As a scholar and social scientist, Zoli says there are three reasons why she thinks the WSP mission is so important. “Firstly, the project teaches veterans returning to school the core fundamental critical analytical skills needed for success and excellence in higher education and beyond.” WSP does this by enlisting inspiring professors and mentors to spend time with veterans in “academic boot camps” on many college campuses. There, student veterans discuss the “brass tacks” of some of the great books and great ideas that animate history, and they pitch in with their own interpretations of these texts, thus making their own contribution to timeless debates. “In this way, WSP makes veterans part of the academic conversation.”

“Secondly, WSP recognizes the untapped talent of our professional ‘all-volunteer’ force,” Zoli continues, “something the military has known for years and something the American public realizes, as reflected in longstanding public polls showing the military is one of the most trusted public institutions. It’s time for universities to see and leverage the talent of the all-volunteer force, and WSP helps us do that.” WSP’s mission, in other words, is to help veterans transition to college by tapping into and expand upon skills they learned in the military, such as discipline, motivation, persistence, and resilience. “In the process, academics and students learn a great deal more about military servicemembers and veterans.”

“Thirdly, so often in our public discourse we talk about ‘supporting veterans’ without really thinking about what that means,” Zoli notes. “Surprisingly enough, despite all of this talk of support, we know very little about the veterans in our midst. This is especially true on college campuses—with some exceptions.” One of WSP’s core strengths is that it helps student veterans become leaders on college campuses, leadership being a role many veterans are already quite skilled at given their military training and experiences. “In the process,” Zoli concludes, “college communities are enriched by such knowledge and leadership.”

For more information on the Warrior Scholar Project, visit warrior-scholar.org.

A team led by INSCT Director of Research/Research Assistant Professor Corri Zoli and INSCT Faculty Member, SU Maxwell School Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, and Professor of International Relations Robert Rubinstein has secured a grant from the Maxwell Citizenship Initiative to support the project “Citizenship, Military Service, and Perspectivism.”

The team—which also will be led by Department of Anthropology Chair John Burdick and Anthroplogy Professor Susan Snow Wadley (invited)—will organize an interdisciplinary summer reading session for interested faculty and graduate students. It will discuss research questions in the context of a recent, significant anthropological contribution on the subject of military service and citizenship: Ken MacLeish’s Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton UP, 2013).

“Ken MacLeish was a recent visitor to the SU Maxwell School, during which he discussed his new work,” says Zoli. “His volume is proving useful to military-related research discussions because it provides a foundation on which to debate qualitative methodologies, culture and citizenship, and perspectivism.”

Zoli says the discussion group will examine the following research questions that arise from MacLeish’s visit and scholarship:

1. Why are contemporary US military servicemembers often considered exemplars of American citizenship?
2. Where do such citizenship assumptions come from? Are they based in norms, ideals (“service to country”), practice, history, institutions, bureaucratic politics, and/or other areas? Are they distinctive to the US?
3. Which social science fields have investigated this link between military service and citizenship, and how do qualitative and ethnographic data collection methods figure into this research? What role do especially recent servicemembers’ perspectives play in this research?

Among the goals that Zoli describes for the project are the strengthening of social science faculty networks for a topic of increasing interdisciplinary interest at SU; networking opportunities for graduate students beyond their immediate disciplines; and a co-authored written report on the research discussion parameters, which will form the basis of a workshop slated for spring 2017.

INSCT Director of Research/Research Assistant Professor Corri Zoli—whose most recent work examines the perception of military veterans toward post-service education and employment—has been invited by Warrior-Scholar Project Executive Director Sidney T. Ellington to join the WSP Academic Board of Directors.

Enlisted veterans often entered the military directly from high school, resulting in a long absence from the classroom and a concomitant lack of confidence when considering academia. WSP seeks to unlock veterans’ potential to succeed in higher education by addressing their misperceptions with immersive one- to two-week long academic boot camps (including college readiness classes) hosted at universities throughout the US during summer break.

Zoli—who presented to the 2015 WSP academic boot camp held at SU in July 2015—joins other distinguished members of WSP’s academic board, including Gen. David H. Petraeus (Ret.) and Ambassador Paul Russo.