Tell Me Your Story Again

Across U.S. institutions of higher education today, the influx of military undergraduates—those students who bring personal military experience, whether as veterans or current service members, with them to college—is rising to levels not seen since WWII. This influx, catalyzed by the expansion of federal education benefits in the post 9/11 era and energized by servicemember drawdowns from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, has resulted in a new generation of military undergraduates enrolling in post-secondary education and preparing for professional civilian careers.

Research related to military undergraduates in higher education is necessitated by the nation’s reliance on civilian colleges and universities to educate and support discharged military servicemembers as they transition into civilian society.  Despite this enduring and timeless mission, institutional efforts to support and retain military undergraduates in higher education ebb and flow in response to everchanging historical and political moments. Resultantly, much of what is known today about the educational experiences of military undergraduates has been constructed from information collected from past generations and does not challenge or attempt to refine essentialized and often biased narratives of who military servicemembers are and what they need to succeed in higher education.  Scant research exists that adds to basic understandings of the complex transitional and developmental experiences of today’s military undergraduate as they attempt to mesh the identities of veteran and/or servicemember with those of student and emerging professional.

The purpose of this presentation is to raise awareness of the often hidden and overlooked military undergraduate in higher education. I present an overview of current understandings relative to military undergraduates in higher education, highlighting the gaps and assumptions present in this body of literature. Next, I outline more contemporary findings about military students in the field of engineering education. I conclude the presentation with a brief overview of my newer NSF CAREER study, which employs a longitudinal narrative inquiry approach to both critically and interpretively examine the near real-time experiences of military engineering undergraduates at 2- and 4- year public colleges and universities in the western United States.