Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education by Jan Armino, Tomoko Kudo Grabosky, and Josh Lang (review)

As U.S. service members return home from military service abroad, higher education professionals grapple with how best to serve a community of student veterans that continues to grow in both size and diversity. Serving today’s student veterans requires both practical understanding and sensitivity, as student veterans often juggle unique goals and pressures. To this end, Student Veterans and Service Members in Higher Education provides a meaningful context for examining veteran and service member expectations, needs, and challenges as we work to help them navigate higher education.

The text is a finale for a team of authors that spent “two years collecting and analyzing data and writing results” (p. xii) and is part of the Key Issues on Diverse College Students series through Routledge publishing: Jan Arminio (Professor and Director of Higher Education at George Mason University), Tomoko Kudo Grabosky (Licensed Professional Counselor and Associate Professor at Shippensburg University), and Josh Lang (Co-founder of the Pennsylvania Student Veterans Coalition and Business Analyst at VetAdvisor Services). These authors have collaborated to provide sound theoretical perspectives and practical uses for higher education practitioners like me who continue to pursue strategies for improving service to student veterans and service members (SVSM). Their work addresses the growing need for higher education practitioners to gain familiarity with this specialty population and, in doing so, helps mitigate the underrepresentation of SVSM in academic literature.

The book consists of eight chapters that provide a historical and cultural context in which to view SVSM as well as theoretical frameworks, best practices, and future directions. In Chapter 1, “Historical Context of Student Veterans and Service Members,” the authors discuss veteran educational benefits in the U.S. and the events that prompted them. In this chapter, the authors made sense of the relationship between worthwhile benefits and an effective military, as well as the economic context and the public view of SVSM benefits throughout U.S. history. The authors also included helpful charts outlining post-Vietnam benefit programs, the year instituted, the program’s requirements, and an explanation of the benefit received by an SVSM (pp. 16-17). This chapter is especially helpful in learning about the different types of educational benefits awarded to SVSM as well as some foundational background.

Chapter 2, “Cultural Context,” discusses the unique cultural differences SVSM experience entering college. This chapter provides an in-depth look at the multi-site case study the authors conducted to show the cultural conflicts that SVSM experience in the college environment. From there, the authors offer a compare and contrast between the cultures that exist in U.S. military and higher education, as well as cultural differences that exist specifically for SVSM as they transition to college. While higher education literature is full of articles and books that specifically talk about the transition process, the integration from military to civilian life is an important one to learn, especially for higher education professionals that have not served themselves. Finally, the authors supply an introduction of Berry’s (2005) model of acculturation to provide a framework for understanding these cultural differences between the two environments of military and higher education that is evident from SVSM responses. The authors contend that Berry’s model “takes into account the existence of power differentiation and dynamics between SVSM (non-dominant group) and higher education (dominant group)” and “offers various approaches that SVSM can use in order to acculturate in a college environment” (p. 35). The authors also use Berry’s model to “describe acculturation strategies of both SVSM (non-dominant group) and higher education (dominant group)” (pp. 35-36).

The authors begin to dive into their multi-site case study findings in Chapter 3, “Facilitators and Barriers to Success.” The authors used two public institutions, one a community college (CC) and one a research-extensive institution (RI), for their study sites. This allowed the authors to...