U. trails peers in veteran numbers

Miles, a retired colonel who served in the Vietnam War and currently teaches HIS 411: War and Society in the Modern World, told Theen that although the University was a welcoming place for veterans, the school was not going out of its way to recruit them.

“Had I been aware of the statistics that were in the Bloomberg article when the correspondent contacted me, I might have expressed a stronger statement about the need for Princeton devising a more assertive approach, an outreach program,” Miles said. “I was quite surprised by the disparity between the numbers at Princeton and other institutions.”

University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua confirmed that the University only has four veterans enrolled at the school, two of whom are undergraduates and two of whom are graduate students. This figure stands in stark contrast to schools like Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, which have 459, 250 and 145 veterans enrolled, respectively.

Princeton’s numbers pale in comparison to other Ivies as well. The article stated that Cornell had 93 veterans enrolled, but the school’s communications office said they were unaware of the article and reported that 103 students received veterans’ benefits, though the figure cannot differentiate veterans from dependents of veterans. Of the 103 beneficiaries, 53 are undergraduates.

Brown Director of News and Communications Darlene Trew Crist said the school has 10 undergraduate veterans enrolled, in addition to one medical student and one graduate student. According to the article, 13 veterans are enrolled at Yale, and 36 are enrolled at Dartmouth.

“The statistics speak for themselves,” Miles said. “Why is Princeton — which is in so many ways similar to other Ivy League institutions — why does it appear different on this one issue?”

Not Entirely Accurate

One answer to Miles’s question is that the University’s military enrollment might not be as low as the article suggests. When Steven Kreeger GS read the Bloomberg article, he said he viewed the numbers with suspicion.

“It’s the same as any other article that uses a lot of numbers — normally it feels like they’re playing with it,” said Kreeger, an Army officer who served in Iraq after graduating from West Point in 2004 and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Woodrow Wilson School.

Kreeger said he was confused while reading the article because he has a “half-dozen” friends in the Wilson School graduate programs with military experience. Like many of his Wilson School colleagues, Kreeger is still on active duty and was not included in the figure Mbugua provided both Bloomberg and The Daily Princetonian.

Unless students receive funding through specific initiatives such as the GI Bill or the Yellow Ribbon program, the University has no way to track their veteran status, Mbugua said in an email.

The Wilson School specifically may differ from the rest of the University. The school conducts its own graduate admissions process and uses criteria that may reflect values that differ from those of the University at large. Emile Cochet GS, who is studying for his Masters in Public Policy, said that the Wilson School has a tradition of accepting members of the Coast Guard like himself to the program.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

John Templeton, associate dean of graduate admissions at the Wilson School, said in an email that the MPP program has recently established relationships with the Coast Guard and the Navy Seals.

Additionally, Templeton said the Wilson School sometimes accepts some of the 15 students selected annually by the U.S. Army to pursue a Master’s degree before teaching at West Point for three years and then continuing their service. Furthermore, Wilson School representatives have visited military academies to “learn more about the curriculum and how to evaluate applicants,” Templeton said.

“The Woodrow Wilson School has been tremendously supportive,” said Mike Hunzeker, a Marine officer who served two tours in Iraq and is now in his sixth year of Ph.D. study. “I can say fairly unambiguously that I would not be in the program had it not been for my service. That was the unique aspect that got me in the door here.”

‘Traditionally Placed Undergraduates’

But outside of the Woodrow Wilson School’s graduate programs, there are indeed just four veterans enrolled at the University. The disparity between Princeton and other schools is in some ways due to Princeton’s identity primarily as an undergraduate institution, in addition to the current composition of the U.S. military.

In the wake of World War II, over 2,500 returning veterans enrolled at the University, leading to the construction of the Butler Apartments — or the Butler Barracks as they were called — to accommodate them. The military draft drew men from all segments of society.

Nowadays, many of the veterans who lack a college degree upon being discharged are enlisted soldiers, as many officers attended one of the military academies for college or participated in an officer training program during their undergraduate years. Enlisted soldiers are also disproportionately from lower-income and lower-education backgrounds.

“I’m going to generalize and say your average army soldier who joined the Army — if he could get into Princeton, he would have probably come to Princeton,” said Morgan Greene GS, a 2002 West Point graduate who has served in Iraq and is now in his second year of the Wilson School’s Masters in Public Affairs program. “Not to say these people aren’t capable, but there’s this thought in their minds that maybe Princeton’s beyond their reach.”

“A lot of the people who are coming out of the military are not necessarily from a socioeconomic background or an education background where they think, ‘I can get into Harvard,’” said Kevin Bell GS, a veteran who served as an Army platoon leader in Paktya Province, Afghanistan and is pursuing a Master’s in the Near Eastern Studies department.

Furthermore, the University’s identity as an undergraduate institution — along with its policy against accepting transfer students and transfer credits — may make the University less accessible to discharged enlisted soldiers applying to undergraduate programs.

“Our undergraduate program is composed entirely of full-time students and we have no transfer admission process,” Mbugua said in an email. “Some other institutions with a more varied array of programs may offer options that provide greater flexibility to veterans.”

Indeed, Joshua Haecker ’13 said that the University’s unwillingness to accept the credits he had accumulated while studying at a community college affiliated with the Army almost prevented him from attending.

But it’s not just the University’s admission policy that accounts for the paucity of veterans. The University’s focus on the undergraduate experience and campus life may make it less conducive to what veterans, who are often older than the average undergraduate, are looking for.

“There are not going to be a lot of vets in that situation,” of being a traditional undergraduate student, said Roy Scranton GS, who served with the Army in Baghdad and enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the English department in the fall of 2010. “My experience is that Princeton is so geared towards undergrads, and traditionally placed undergrads, that I already knew that there wasn’t a large veteran community here and I didn’t expect one.”

For Raphael Balsam ’12, who enlisted in the Marines after graduating from high school in Long Island and served tours in the Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, the University’s focus on undergraduates has brought its fair share of difficulties.

Still in the reserves as a freshman at the University, Balsam wished to attend drills once a month and requested an exception to the rule preventing underclassmen from having cars on campus.

“It quickly became clear that she had no interest in reasonably accommodating my desire to continue my service,” Balsam said of the interaction he had with an administrator over the issue.

Recruitment and Aid

According to Balsam, the administration also fails to place an importance on attracting veterans to campus and supporting them while they are here. This provides another partial explanation for Miles’s initial question about the disparity.

Balsam said that while the University’s positive treatment of the ROTC program compared to its peers — namely, its decision not to ban the program during the Vietnam War — and was part of what initially attracted him to the Princeton, he has been “continuously disappointed” with the administration’s attitude towards the military since his arrival.

Many of Princeton’s peer institutions take active steps to recruit veterans in particular, including advertising in military publications or visiting bases. Columbia, for example, has a School of General Studies, which was created specifically for WWII veterans and remains geared toward veterans and other non-traditional undergraduate students.

Furthermore, Princeton is the only Ivy League institution not to participate in the undergraduate level of the Yellow Ribbon program, a voluntary program by which colleges and universities can provide veteran students with additional funds to supplement those received from the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

“Princeton’s position is completely untenable,” Balsam said of Princeton’s lack of participation in the Yellow Ribbon program on the undergraduate level. “We are making such assholes of ourselves. We are just saying to the world, and saying to the alums, look at all these other patriotic Ivy League institutions who value the service of veterans. We don’t. And even if this is not what we mean to say, this is how it comes off.”

Mbugua said that Princeton does not offer the Yellow Ribbon program to undergraduates because it would amount to providing financial aid to undergraduates on a basis other than demonstrated need, which is against the University’s “firm policy.”

But Director of Undergraduate Financial Aid Robin Moscato said that the University’s current aid policies and programs often benefit veterans even more than the Yellow Ribbon program would.

Moscato said that the University stopped factoring in benefits received from the post-9/11 GI Bill into its financial aid formula three years ago, following a change in the federal government’s aid program.

Therefore, Mbugua explained, the University does not count federal Veterans Administration benefits as income when determining the level of a student’s grant, emphasizing that this was different from the University’s usual treatment of outside benefits.

“For the vast majority of eligible students this policy is much more generous than the results of how the Yellow Ribbon program is currently implemented at many of our peer institutions who still consider the VA benefit as a student award or resource,” Moscato said.

Retired Col. Doug Lovejoy GS ’68, the former director of Princeton’s ROTC program and current vice president of Alumni and Friends of Princeton ROTC, said he was not surprised by the very low undergraduate veteran enrollment or the University’s decision not to participate in the undergraduate Yellow Ribbon program.

“Princeton admissions are so tight and there is a focus on kids coming more or less out of school, no more than one or two years,” Lovejoy said. He added that he thought Princeton’s financial aid program adequately meets the needs of most veterans and that he thought Moscato had been very helpful.

Nevertheless, Lovejoy said he would like to see more outreach from the admissions office to academically qualified enlisted soldiers, comparing the efforts to those the University currently undertakes to make itself more visible to students with a lower-quality high school education.

Many of the veteran and active-duty students interviewed for this article said that they felt entirely welcome at the University, and that they did not think the disparity in veteran enrollment between Princeton and its peer institutions reflected any kind of bias or discrimination.

Nevertheless, they said that even a small amount of targeted recruiting of veterans could not hurt.

“Maybe Princeton can do more to bring people in, but there is absolutely no negative stigma I’ve encountered since coming here,” Kreeger said. “I don’t think it’s anything Princeton’s doing wrong, it might be a push from the other universities.”

“Some schools are actively going after these people, whereas Princeton at least right now isn’t,” Green said. “I don’t think that’s necessarily negative. Maybe it highlights a deficiency that can be addressed or maybe it highlights Princeton’s priorities or maybe it’s just something they overlooked. I’m not offended that maybe there’s less veterans here than at Columbia.”

A Greater Responsibility?

Some universities are explicitly aiming to do what they can to help some veterans adjust.

“It’s one small way in which we can honor and support the service of our military,” a spokesperson for Cornell told the ‘Prince’ regarding the university’s decision to offer Yellow Ribbon funds to undergraduates. “The men and women who serve, at grave risk to themselves, deserve at least this amount of support.”

According to Professor of Economics and Public Affairs Uwe Reinhardt, whose son Mark Reinhardt ’01 served as a Marine Officer in Iraq, the University is not fulfilling this responsibility.

“I personally believe that universities owe these guys every conceivable way to find their way back in,” Reinhardt said, noting that the alienation many soldiers face upon their return is both unjust and potentially dangerous to society.

But the extent of changes that the University would need to make in order to adequately play that role is a subject of debate. Mbugua and Moscato maintained that Princeton’s financial aid policy coupled with the unique treatment of GI Bill benefits ensured that the University was treating veterans fairly.

Reinhardt argued that enrolling more veterans would enrich campus by creating a new kind of diversity, and Balsam said that the lack of effort the University puts into recruiting veterans “impoverishes the undergraduate student body.”

Kreeger noted that the University is widely reputed to be the most military-friendly of its peers, and that the disparity is likely just a result of “happenstance.” But Scranton, the graduate student who served in Baghdad, said that while this perspective might be common among officers, it is all but absent among enlisted soldiers like himself.

“In the enlisted culture, there’s no cognizance of Princeton or any university really having any cache,” Scranton said. “That would be something officers might talk about. Us Joes, no.”

As a result, Miles would like to see Princeton adapt the Yellow Ribbon program and take other steps to make the University more visible to those veterans who lack any higher education — whose ranks will only continue to increase as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq come to a close.

“I still think that it would have symbolic meaning,” Miles said of what adapting the Yellow Ribbon program on an undergraduate level would mean.

“It would be one way of underlining Princeton’s commitment to at least providing opportunities for veterans to apply if veterans saw Princeton on the list of institutions participating in the Yellow Ribbon program.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the rank of history professor Paul Miles GS ’99. He is a retired colonel. The 'Prince' regrets the error.