Services Offered

• Provide training to Faculty and Staff who are unfamiliar with military transition issues and means to develop relational networks to better manage them
• Streamline assessment, services, and policies amongst very different provider organizations to Veterans with Disabilities (particularly Traumatic Brain Injury - TBI)
• Identify core challenges toward delivering, measuring effectiveness of educationally based services for veterans with learning and emotionally based disabilities
• Customize learning strategies for veterans having TBI for independent engagement of work and school

Services Explained: The Challenge

More Veterans Transitioning to College
Currently 1.42 million men and women are serving on active duty. It is estimated that 95% of active duty personnel who enroll in the GI bill will pursue a college degree after their active duty commitment is complete. Recently, the media has resonated that amongst this inevitable title wave of degree seeking veterans many colleges will not be prepared for their complications. A significant portion of these new students are likely to have severe and multiple disabilities and will need to adjust to civilian life.

The Needs They Will Have
The Department of Justice Office of Civil Rights reports that veterans are expected, through their college enrollment, to chart new grounds in terms of disabilities and civil rights. The New England Journal of Medicine cites that the scope of current US combat engagement is in many ways more significant than those of past military operations. This combination of factors means that the veteran population enrolling in colleges and universities will have more significant needs then their peers of past generations.

Areas of Weakness in Higher Education
The below points describe some of the challenges that colleges and universities will have when organizing to make our wounded warriors welcome on their campuses.

• Different Languages between Organizations (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  Active duty soldiers and disabled vets recently inflicted with permanent and/or treatable injuries have to wade through significant bureaucratic red tape before reintegrating into a civilian environment. Each organization is providing severely impaired soldiers, sailors, and airmen with assistance that often has very different ways of understanding what disabilities are and what should be done to assist persons having them.
  
  Different organizations make different assumptions about what other organizations can do. Some assumptions driven by these organizations are the result of not speaking the same language. For example, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as state agencies serving veterans do not define disabilities in the same way as colleges and universities.
  
  To further complicate the disabilities assessment process some impairments are not known until a veteran engages the learning and thinking specific to a college context. Often this makes the college manage the effects of disability with little or no written history of it.
  
  
• Assumptions Driving the Challenge of Veteran College Enrollment (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  The misalignment between military leader’s expectations and college administrator’s confidence in their ability to respond to veterans with disabilities is likely to leave these “wounded warriors” alienated from the higher education experience.
  
  The military is confident that with the flood of GI dollars that the various university systems will be able to anticipate as well as mold itself to the needs of our former solders to include those with disabilities.
  
  College leaders have the reasonable impression that their institution will be able to respond to a sudden spike in demand in its “wounded warrior” students because they have already established disability services departments for this purpose.
  
  However, veterans might become frustrated when obtaining an education since the military and colleges systems do not understand each others’ perspective. Without effective interventions in-place, the projected veteran college “drop-out” rate could be significant.
  
  The issue of vets falling through the cracks of disabilities programs is further explained in the points below:
  
  

  • College Disabilities Offices Organized Around LD not TBI
    Most disabilities departments are designed to manage students with a Learning Disorder (LD) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyper Active Disorder). 97% of these students who qualify as having a disability are defined as such by not performing up to their “potential” ability as opposed to having a significant impairment relative to the average person in the general population. In contrast, less than 1% of most college campuses have students who report their need for campus adjustments because of a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). As a result, colleges have not sought out the expertise amongst its disabilities professionals which reflect degreed study in metacognitive techniques as applied to individuals with targeted thinking and emotional deficits. These deficits are typically working memory, procession speed, special orientation, and emotional stability.
    
    Note: Metacognitive refers to person’s knowledge about his or her own thinking processes. In this context, metacognative training speaks to teaching someone to learn how to learn most efficiently given specific his or her thinking limitations or differences. In practice, having knowledge about one’s own strengths, weaknesses and differences in learning can help that person best maximize his or her thinking potential.
    
  
  
  • Colleges Cannot Be Aware of the TBI Student
    Colleges are often less aware that such services are provided to students who must self-disclose their disabilities. Vets may be coming to campus without an understanding of the full parameters of their recently acquired limitations. Many of them will be unaware of the degree to which they are injured until they attempt to engage in serious study. This means that veterans’ who may be unaware of the impact of the Traumatic Brain Injury on their learning and recall are more likely to fail an academic program before recognizing what supports they would need to better access a program of study.
    
  
  
• Specific Disabilities and the Challenges of College Life (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  Colleges are not yet ready to receive veterans with significant impairments because serving veterans requires the addressing several overlapping complex and inseparable needs. These needs relate to the synergistic effect of transitioning from civilian to military culture with the challenges associated coming with:
  • Traumatic Brain Injury
  • Reconnecting with family
  • GI bill funding delays
  • Psychological as well as physical disabilities
  • Long-term treatment approaches
  • Employment
  
  No one these listed needs with which vets are confronted can be managed independently from the whole of these issues
  
  
  
  
• Different Perspectives between Military and Civilian Cultures (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  Military and college leaders may not be aware that veteran students have trouble adjusting to the typically liberal college environment because of a misunderstanding of who they are.
  
  "It's not a cool thing to kill somebody… It's just ignorant. People are going out to movies and going to the bars and have no thought about what's going on outside the world of campus. "
  
  Quote by Aaron Mowen, 22, in response to peer students asking him whether he killed anyone while he was stationed in Fallujah.
  
  With few means to help them adjust to college life, vets struggle to understand their civilian counterparts. Trouble can result in a range of veteran issues from feeling misunderstood to feeling alienated. These issues can stem from:
  
  

  • Faculty and Staff Beliefs about Military Service
    Instructors and staff often believe that former military personnel can only take orders and do little more. The conclusion made, then, is that the military minded are unable to think for themselves. The following statements made about veterans in “Disability Compliance in Higher Education Vol. 13 Issue 3 resonate that belief:
    
    
    • They are used to life being simplified, with few to no decisions to make, so they are often overwhelmed with complexities, such as campus bureaucracies or classroom assignments”
    • “They aren’t used to making decisions or being self-directed”
    • “They are used to the ‘high’ of war, and may react poorly to the slow pace of life.”
      
      
    The true explanation for veteran behavior rests in their training. Soldiers are taught to get feedback (primarily for coordination purposes with other units) on their understanding of a mission before executing it in all its aspects. Making assumptions about what class-work a superior (in this case instructor) wants is considered as rude as it is arrogant. Because military culture suggests taking pause so to clarify the objective before taking action and acting without direction can potentially leave out critical components of typically very complex field plans.
    
    
  • Counseling Services Are Not Aware of Military Thinking
    Many colleges have a “Counseling Services” department to help students with their emotional challenges. Very few counselors nationwide have a familiarity with military culture as it applies to decision-making, ethics, pragmatism, and virtually any other daily activity having a civilian context. Problems arise when counselors make clinical assumptions about a veteran student’s behavior that would otherwise be completely reasonable from a military perspective.
    
    Most college counseling and psychological services departments seldom meet with vets for ongoing PTSD and TBI assistance and there are few support groups in place. As a result, there are not many ways for vets to "vent" frustration when balancing the stress of school with the alienation of trying to assimilate to a foreign environment.
    
    Counseling and psychological departments often refer veterans with “unique” needs to private clinics. These clinics then become the linkage between the military’s personnel and their young families, as well as the means of coping through alcoholism, substance abuse, divorce, and sometimes tragically even suicide.
    
  
  
• Subtle Brain Injuries Which Few Colleges Can Identify or Remedy (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  Persons with newly acquired Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) may not necessarily be aware of the scope of their newly acquired deficiencies until those abilities actually are challenged. This means that veterans may be discharged from the military with no idea that they may be suffering from a significant learning impairment.
  
  Consider a person who has lost (to some degree) their working, short-term or long-term memory. They may only recognize an impact on the memory resources that they immediately use. Their working and short-term memory deficits may be most noticeably deficient because they are used in the management of each day’s details. However, long-term memory deficits may not be discovered as weak until those persons attempt to engage in intensive study that demands recall for an exam or other real-life task. In this case, the only remediation is to pair the persons enduring these deficits with clinicians who can observe how they manifest over the course of different learning situations. Few universities have professionals that are both trained and utilized in this field of metacognition (e.g. learning how to learn) in light of a significant brain injury.
  
  
  

The Consequence of Waiting

The result of colleges not having the funding or the staffing in place to meet its wounded warriors when they do enroll means that those veterans must wait for campus support for alignment. The result of waiting can either facilitate veteran withdrawal or action.

• Veteran Withdrawal from School or Employment (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  A result of forcing service members and veterans to wait longer to get their life on a career track means we can expect that they are more likely to feel depressed, discouraged and dependent upon the government to support them. The longer people feel alienated, the less likely they will have the emotional resources to re-engage regular employment, as well as society in a mainstream sense of the word.
  
  “Surrounded by fresh-faced students who can't relate to their experiences, many veterans end up feeling isolated, unwelcome and out of touch with other students.”
  
  From “Veterans fight to fit in at college” Marisa Schultz /The Detroit News
  
  
  
• Veteran Action to Change the System (Click To Expand/Collapse)
  
  Cheryl Branker (from North Carolina State University) and Moses Gloria (from The Department of Veterans Affairs) said that “being in (legal) compliance is just the beginning, but creating a veteran with disabilities friendly campus is crucial.” Veterans coming back to a college campus will not wait for services, but can expect these disabilities services to be in place.
  
  Veterans are unlike other historically underserved groups. They are well-noted to be quick, and have traditionally used political contacts as well as the press to make their case. If colleges and universities are not well prepared, the legal liabilities as well as resulting public perception challenges could be enormous.
  

The ILU Goal

Our goal is to help organizations working with veterans having disabilities outline what steps might be useful to take when planning for their frequently hidden psychological and cultural differences. Our intention is to design streamlined collaborative service delivery programs, as well as policies for veterans that will quickly respond to their needs.

We have outlined several options for Colleges to take in order to prepare for the expectations that are sure to come with this emerging population and to comply with the budget limitations of most higher-educational institutions.