Standing with Student Veterans in a Changing Higher Education Landscape

March 19, 2025

In 2013, I was invited to observe my first Warrior-Scholar Project seminar, led by the late Professor Charles Hill. The discussion centered on “equality of conditions,” a key concept in Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal Democracy in America. A dozen warrior-scholars participated actively, all having clearly completed and digested the reading, sharing unique insights that reflected diverse backgrounds and perspectives. It was unlike any academic environment I had experienced. What universe did I step into? I pondered.

The Warrior-Scholar Project model is built on a straightforward premise: if you bring enlisted veterans to campus, challenge them to rise to the occasion, and provide them with the right support, they will exceed expectations. By doing so, they demonstrate to college and university administrators and faculty the value enlisted veterans bring to the classroom, and they build the confidence and skills to set their academic sights high. Or, as I often put it: to kick ass in higher ed.

We have grown considerably since our founding, having now minted over 2,500 warrior-scholars through academic boot camps—stunningly about 90% of whom go on to complete their degrees. We’ve expanded services judiciously, piloting graduate school support, career support, and workshops to serve community college students. We are on the verge of launching an OnDemand model, which stands to massively expand our impact.

But for all the growth, our ethos remains unchanged. We stand proudly by our values: “We are a community grounded in authenticity, compassion, and inclusivity. We believe in lifelong learning and service. We believe in integrity driven by accountability and transparency. We believe in intentional innovation that cultivates growth and opportunity for all. We believe in you.” These values have long served as the bedrock for the transformational discussions in the WSP classroom.

Implicitly, our work has always relied on another belief: that higher education is in and of itself valuable. But in this era where our higher education partners find themselves under tremendous scrutiny and pressure, it’s important to make this explicit: we believe that higher education is valuable, provides singular opportunities for economic mobility, plays a pivotal role in growing the perspective of students, and serves as an essential forum for building strong communities that are essential to our social fabric. Veterans leverage these higher education opportunities with assistance from the G.I. Bill, one of the most important transition tools available, to build their next chapters as civic leaders.

We stand with those who continue to strive for diverse perspectives in the classroom, specifically including the voices of enlisted veterans, where all feel genuinely included no matter who they are or where they come from.

Moreover, WSP opposes changes that negatively impact stable funding and support for student veterans that help them channel their service into meaningful degrees. The impact of recent changes is not diffuse or abstract. WSP alumni, whom we engage with every single day, are struggling to figure out how to make sense of the rapid changes in higher education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Education. All veterans deserve access to high-quality education, and they deserve clarity on pathways toward that education.

Warrior-scholars still read Tocqueville in our humanities boot camps. This summer, hundreds of eager veterans will wrestle with his equality of conditions argument on college campuses throughout the country, assessing it against the backdrop of their military service. They’ll compare those arguments to their own unique understanding of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, documents they’ll read within the first days of the boot camp.

Other students will participate in our boot camps focused on STEM and business, the two other curricula we’ve developed over the years that offer different academic approaches to solving complex problems. Collectively, these three offerings present broad onramps into virtually every type of undergraduate degree, recognizing that our students have a huge range of interests and desired paths.

No matter which subject area they pursue, these warrior-scholars will build analytical skills and will be confronted with views they disagree with, both from instructors and fellow students. They’ll learn how to respond openly yet respectfully, and will engage in candid conversation on what it’s really like to be a veteran on campus these days.

Having personally worked with thousands of veterans over the years, I can say confidently that military service changes people. Our country needs people like this—those who have grown while collaborating with teammates who think and act differently to accomplish missions far bigger than themselves—to continue building perspective through higher education and then to lead in myriad capacities. We need them in government. We need them in corporate America. We need them in the nonprofit sector. We need them in research labs. And no matter where they work, we need them to channel that prior service into outsized, enduring impact.

Warrior-Scholar Project is proud to contribute to this vision by playing our part in the higher education space, and we will not stop doing so. We hope you will join us.

Yours In Service,

Ryan Pavel
Chief Executive Officer
Warrior-Scholar Project