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Reviewed by:
  • Veterans in Higher Education: When Johnny and Jane Come Marching to Campus
  • David Vacchi
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 staff automatically 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 “Transitions 2.0” chapter highlights numerous empirical rationales that convincingly suggest Tinto’s theories are not appropriate for researching student veterans, such as insufficiency for modeling student attrition (p. 36).

Despite this acknowledgement, DiRamio and Jarvis use Tinto’s model, reinforcing its inefficacy, and do not address the implications of this incongruity in their theory. For example, they demonstrate that students who connect comfortably only with like-minded peers are at risk of departure (p. 35) yet rationalize the creation of a student veteran office that facilitates connecting veterans largely with other veterans only. The authors frequently cite research emphasizing the link for traditional students between social integration and persistence and inappropriately use it as a contributor to student veteran persistence (p. 47) despite acknowledging veterans as nontraditional students.

The recent student veteran literature also relies heavily on Schlossberg’s transition theory (1981), which was designed for understanding general transitions of adults without a specific context such as higher education or veteran experiences. DiRamio and Jarvis elaborate with mixed success on DiRamio’s earlier work, which also used Schlossberg’s 4S theory. In light of Schlossberg’s comments about using experienced group leaders to facilitate veteran transitions (p. 19), it is surprising that the authors do not connect DiRamio, Ackerman, and Mitchell’s (2008) work in which they suggest that a transition coach may help student veterans (p. 93, Fig. 2). Moving away from the deficit modeling of Tinto and Schlossberg, scholars might also explore student veteran success, rather than presume veterans are failing, an assumption for which they provide no empirical evidence.

Discerning readers may notice that DiRamio and Jarvis seem to portray various services, such as student veterans’ organizations and offices, as panaceas for veteran success. Yet, again, the book provides no empirical evidence to support such a claim. Further, the suggestion that higher...

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