Called to Serve: A Handbook on Student Veterans and Higher Education ed. by Florence Hamrick and Corey Rumann (review)

Florence Hamrick again leads a team with Corey Rumann to help fuel the growing discussion concerning serving student veterans in higher education. I approached this book as both a retired military officer with over twenty years of service and numerous deployments, including combat in Iraq, and as a doctoral student veteran with two research studies behind me and an abundance of scholarly and theoretical work on most aspects addressed in this lengthy volume.

Called to Serve offers 12 chapters of personal perspectives and experience from a group of authors who are not, for the most part, veterans but who are some of the voices from the higher education community actively working on aspects of student veteran programming and services. Student veterans in higher education is not a subject area sufficiently well developed for a definitive volume, certainly not one of this length, because I simply do not see enough substantive research to produce an authoritative handbook for several years.

I might caution professionals not well versed on the topic of student veterans to guard against a complete reliance on this volume to start, sustain, or improve student veteran programming on campus. Still, Hamrick and Rumann do an excellent job of tempering expectations about this volume in their introduction and conclusion, which constitutes responsible caution by the editors against blind benchmarking based on its information.

Each chapter offers some anecdotal experience and observations, an array of assessment considerations, and a personal vignette by a student veteran or by a staff member who works with student veterans. For example, the vignette at the end of Chapter 4 by Sally Caspers at the University of Nevada—Las Vegas offers valuable insights on how staff members should approach and consider student veterans as they arrive at and transition to campus.

There is some inconsistency in style between chapters, some of which are appropriate anecdotal and best practices pieces. Other chapters strive for academic rigor and fall a bit short, largely because of the dearth of research and theory available on student veterans. The opinions and perspectives in this volume run the gamut from magnificent to highly questionable; however, there appear to be some promising strengths amid scattered weaknesses in this book.

At the outset, I would offer the reader a noticeable piece of misleading information and a specific caution when using this book. First, several chapter authors tell the reader, that under the Post 9/11 GI Bill program, veterans are rushed to complete their degrees with "only 36 months of benefits" (e.g., pp. 79, 146, 170), which may lead the unknowing student or administrator to believe that veterans have only three academic years to complete a degree. This is simply false.

The months that a veteran is not in college do not count against GI Bill benefit use; in fact, the typical two-semester academic year consumes roughly seven months of Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits. The reality is that Post 9/11 GI Bill recipients have 10 academic semesters to use their benefits. Couple this span with the high likelihood that most veterans come to college with a minimum core of six to nine credits based on military training, and the Post 9/11 GI Bill program is more properly described as a 10-semester benefit program to complete seven semesters of college.

A second criticism of this volume is the abundance of assertions that various authors make to maintain an authoritative academic or scholarly tone, while the book is really a "best practices" volume. At times its authors struggle with accuracy and effectiveness, sometimes citing questionable studies such as Rudd, Goulding, and Bryan's (2011) study of the psychological challenges of student veterans. This study lacks rigor and accuracy in its use of suicide terminology and inappropriately overstates the potential for suicide risk among student veterans.

Another problematic example is referring to the Council...