At a special presidential forum on Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will appear
back-to-back, take questions from military veterans and talk about how our
country treats them.
Wick Sloane’s complaint probably won’t come up, but I
wish it would.
Sloane teaches at Bunker Hill Community College in
Boston, and eight years ago, after discovering veterans among his students, he
reached out to officials at his own alma maters, Williams College and Yale University, for any guidance they might have about working with
this particular group.
“They were bewildered,” he told me, because they’d had
so little contact with veterans.
He began collecting data, and for several years now, on Veterans Day, he has published an accounting of how many veterans,
among a population of more than two million eligible for federal
higher-education benefits, wind up at America’s most elite colleges. It appears
on the website Inside Higher Ed, and this is from the first paragraph of his
November 2015 tally: “Yale, four; Harvard, unknown; Princeton, one; Williams, one.” Harvard
didn’t grant his request for information, he said.
The tally noted just two veterans among undergraduates
at Duke, one at M.I.T., one at Pomona and zero at Carleton.
“These schools all wring their hands and say, ‘We’d
love to have more, but they just don’t apply,’ ” Sloane said. “That’s what
offends me. These schools have incredibly sophisticated recruitment teams. They
recruit quarterbacks. They fill the physics lab. They visit high schools. How
many visits did they make for veterans?”
The schools in question
educate only a small percentage of this country’s college students, and their
behavior isn’t the most pressing concern for college-minded veterans, who have
graduation rates slightly below other students’ and
who don’t get adequate guidance about how best to use their government
benefits, too much of which go to for-profit
institutions with poor records.
But it’s symbolic. It sends a message: about how much
we prize veterans; about the potential we see in them.
And not-for-profit private colleges like the ones I
mentioned should feel a powerful obligation. They’re exempt from all sorts of
taxes. Donations to them are tax-deductible. So they’re getting enormous help
from the country.
Do they, in turn, go out of their way to embrace the
young men and women — veterans — who have helped the country the most?
Some, yes. Vassar, Wesleyan and Dartmouth are all part
of the Posse Veterans Program, which commits them, each year, to admitting 10
veterans who have been identified by the Posse Foundation as people of
exemplary character and sufficient academic promise. Vassar was the first on
board, four years ago, while Dartmouth just joined.
Deborah Bial, the founder and president of Posse, told
me that the program is already developed enough to provide 10 qualified
veterans annually to another three colleges, and that elite institutions know
about it.
So why haven’t more signed up?
“That’s a great question,” she said.
Some schools have turned to other organizations that,
like Posse, try to point veterans to elite colleges. Yale recently entered into
such a partnership with the group Service to School; a Yale official told me
that the count of veterans among undergraduates has risen to 11 as of this new
academic year. He said that it was six last year, out of nearly 5,500
undergraduates, and that Yale had given Sloane the wrong number.
There is also positive change — if not nearly enough —
elsewhere. Williams and Pomona each added two veterans this year, bringing
their totals to three. M.I.T. is up to four.
“It’s moving in the
right direction,” said Beth Morgan, the executive director of Service to School.
And there are elite schools that have been laudably
ahead of the curve, including Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Brown,
Stanford and U.S.C.
But there are huge discrepancies: The three veterans
at Williams — out of about 2,000 students — compares with 33 at Vassar, out of
about 2,400.
And there’s evasiveness. A Harvard official said that
she’d prefer to give me a combined count of veterans at Harvard College and the Harvard Extension School, a
much different entity. I asked for separate numbers, which she then said she
couldn’t provide by my deadline.
These institutions pride themselves on trying to
reflect America’s diversity, broadening students’ horizons, filling in their
blind spots and preparing tomorrow’s leaders, whose decisions could well include
matters of war.
For those reasons and more, the schools should be
integrating veterans to an extent that some have only just begun to and many
still don’t.
Sloane, whose community
college has more than 400 veterans out of some 14,000 students, suggested that
elite schools commit to at least “as many veterans as freshman football
players.” Great idea. I invite Clinton and Trump to echo his call.
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