Veterans Challenge Higher Education

C OLLEGES and universities are facing perhaps the greatest challenge in their history as a million veterans seek the ways of higher education in America. These deserving students of the sophisticating experience of war and military service will certainly challenge many of the sacred and accepted practices of college training. The questions asked Army counselors by separatees anticipate many of these demands with a realism that merits the serious consideration of college administrators and professors. Colleges and universities will have to meet the earnestness of the veteran with a dynamic appreciation of his probable role in our society. Veterans have sacrificed much to attend our institutions of higher education, and our colleges must assume a responsibility toward each veteran accepted as a student, or there may be dangerous repercussions in the years to come from the cynicism of alumni veterans. Institutions of higher education will be challenged by the variety of students enrolled. The fall semester of 1947-48 will enroll the most diverse student body in the history of higher education in our nation. Not only do the veterans alone represent a tremendous range of experience and travel, but the combination of veteran, young ex-war worker, and young high-school graduate threatens to tax the imagination and ingenuity of the college instructor in reaching all levels of student experience in his lectures. The extrovertive realism of the veteran may arouse the deep concern of the idealistic and youthful civilian student. Attitudes of some veterans toward nationalism and participation in world affairs may not necessarily square with the overt ideals and goals of the recent war, and as participators in bringing victory to the United Nations they may feel that their convictions are well grounded in pragmatic experience. Hence, the somewhat negative and disillusioned attitudes of the veteran will challenge idealistic persons on every front. Participation in this world war has not necessarily made veterans international-minded. Teaching in institutions of higher learning will be complicated not only by the diversity of civilian students, but by several distinctive types of veteran students. Some of them will be lacking in adequate factual informati n to continue advanced work in their field of interest. Thus, the type of refresher training necessary for such students poses a thought

Cynicism · Higher education · Ingenuity · Medical education · Military service · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Realism · Sociology · Education and Military Integration · Law · Medicine · Psychology

• Student Veterans in Transition

  Corey B Rumann, Florence A Hamrick•The Journal of Higher Education•2010

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