What is college like after the military?
You are 27. The kid next to you is 18 and arguing with the professor. Fourteen Veterans on going back to school: who loved it, who quit, and who is still paying for it.
By Vegas Veteran Voices,
From Most Veterans Don’t Know Their Education Benefits, The Man Who’s Helped 9,000 Claim Them
At UNLV, new student Veterans get their own orientation, and somewhere in it comes a piece of advice you will not find in the course catalog. Ross D. Bryant, the U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, delivers it himself.
“Look, do not get into a foreign policy discussion with the kid from Henderson.”
The kid from Henderson has opinions about Iraq. He has not been there. He has, possibly, not been to Pahrump. You are going to sit next to him for a semester, and at some point the two of you will share a grade.
That is college after the military in one sentence. The books are the easy part. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, fourteen Veterans talked about going back to school. A few call it the best thing the service ever gave them. One got expelled. One thinks you may not need it at all.
The room is full of 18-year-olds
Travis Jewell, a Marine Corps Veteran, 1/6 mortarman and comedy creator, tried a regular campus first.
“That’s why college wasn’t for me when I got out.”
What he saw was teenagers mouthing off at the instructor, and he worked out that somebody else had to be paying for their seat. He left the classroom, finished a cybersecurity degree online and was done in about three and a half years.
Cole Waterberry, a Veteran married to another one, heard the same reports at the dinner table while his wife Jamie finished her degree at UNLV. She was not annoyed. She was recruited.
“She would come home and talk about the students in her class, like 18-year-olds freaking out about giving a presentation in school.”
Anybody who has briefed a colonel can talk to a room of sophomores, he says, so she ended up coaching them through it.
Bryant says the real test is not the kid in the hallway. It is the group project.
“Here you are like a former sergeant in the Marines and you have a project to get X done and everyone has their assignments and yet there is no gunny sergeant and you’re not a sergeant.”
Nobody outranks anybody, the grade is shared, and yelling is off the table. His office tells Veterans to lead by example and to come see him if a class goes sideways. He says he went back to school himself in the 1980s and felt the gap then; after twenty years of war he sees it far more often. UNLV counts about 2,300 military-affiliated students.
Edward Haines, a retired Marine Master Sergeant who went back for a degree and is now an athletic trainer, found the upside of being the oldest person in the room. When a classmate was furious that a lecturer never fixed a grade, after all of them had already passed their boards, he had the only reasonable response.
“Dude, just relax, dude. It doesn’t matter. We’ve made it through the program.”
Some of them needed exactly that
Maximilian Uriarte, a Marine Corps infantry Veteran and the creator of Terminal Lance, went to art school in the Bay Area about a year after Iraq. On the first day the class covered a table in butcher paper, set out cups of watered-down dye, handed everyone a straw and told them to blow bubbles.
“I had just come back from Iraq like not even a year ago and here I am blowing bubbles on paper.”
He says he was taken aback. He also says it was a safe place to come down from where he had been, and that everybody needs one. His verdict on the benefit that paid for it is not subtle.
“To me the GI Bill is the greatest benefit that’s ever been invented.”
Lindsay Gutierrez, a U.S. Air Force Veteran, got out in 2016 and followed her husband’s orders to a small town in Georgia. “I don’t have a job. I don’t have anything there for me. I have no family, no friends, nothing.” Hear it at 29:21 She enrolled in a master’s program in social work, and for a few years school was the thing holding the week together.
“My school was there for me this entire time.”
Letoi Adams, a U.S. Army Veteran and adaptive athlete with Paralyzed Veterans of America, went to college to play wheelchair basketball five days a week. She visited the campus in Wisconsin first. “They tricked me though, cuz when I went out there, the weather was nice.” Hear it at 11:25 The snow came up to her hip. What worried her more was the classroom.
“I was really hesitant because I’m not the best student there is.”
She says the support on campus is what made her want to go.
And Jennifer Bennie, a U.S. Navy Veteran and naval aviator, went back with a question she had carried through her deployments, about why the people below her aircraft had been fighting for so long.
“When I got back from my deployments and I used my GI Bill to get a master’s degree of history, it was because I wanted to know more about America and I wanted to connect all the dots to where we are today.”
The slow way and the expensive way
You do not have to wait until you are out. Randall Parkes, a Marine Corps Veteran, drill instructor and founding MARSOC Raider, promised his grandmother at the recruiter’s door that he would get a degree. He kept the promise on tuition assistance, between deployments.
“I started taking classes and it took me 10 years to get my undergrad, just like one class at a time.”
“Dudes are going to get tacos and margaritas and I’m staying back doing my algebra homework.”
He was a poor student in high school and close to a 4.0 the second time, because this time he cared. If he did it again, he says, he would have gotten out first and gone to school full time.
Daniel Coffeen, a U.S. Army Veteran and Ranger School graduate, did get out first. He enrolled in physical therapy school, hated the hospital rotations, and started skipping them to film videos in another city.
“I get expelled with like two months left.”
“I literally wasted that GI Bill. I could have given it to my daughter.”
He says he is still paying the benefit back. That is his account of his own case; what VA does when a student leaves a program is VA’s to explain, and its education page is linked below.
Two programs, two promises
Most of this runs on the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which according to VA can cover tuition and fees, a monthly housing allowance and money for books. There is a second program that people mix up with it: Veteran Readiness and Employment, which VA describes as being for service members and Veterans with service-connected disabilities that limit their ability to work.
The difference matters when you tell the counselor what you want to be. Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, was on the second program, not the GI Bill, when she walked in twenty years ago.
“He was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I really think I want to be an actor.’ And he’s like, ‘We’re not paying for that.’”
She took a degree in international politics, and then became an actress anyway. You may have seen her on Stranger Things. She says she thought about mailing him a postcard for every role. She also says she gets it: that program exists to put you back to work.
Bryant tells the same story from the other side of the desk. By his account, a student who had been put out of the service with a back injury wanted UNLV’s golf management degree and was turned down, on the reasoning that golf and a bad back do not improve together. The program paid for computer science instead.
Or skip it
Not everybody thinks the classroom is the point. Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran who built a car business, makes the contrary case.
“90% of the entrepreneurs that I know, most of them are just either high school or high school dropouts.”
“I feel like they push you in this funnel to be a good employee, not an entrepreneur.” Hear it at 53:46
Set that next to Uriarte and you have the argument. One says go, to any school, for anything. The other says look at who is actually running things. Haines lands in between: he has nothing against college, he says, but at 18 it would have been the wrong answer for him, and after twenty years in the Marine Corps it was the right one.
What was missing
Juan Valdez, a Marine Corps Veteran and Purple Heart recipient who works with Wounded Warrior Project, went looking for his people on campus the way campuses suggest. He joined a fraternity. He was president of his pledge class. He lasted a semester.
“It was missing and I was mad about it.”
What was missing was the kind of brotherhood where somebody drives out at three in the morning to find you. That is the gap Bryant says he pitched his whole office to fill, back when the university was asking what to do about everyone coming home.
“You need to have Veterans helping Veterans, not just the staff getting everyone paid.”
Jamie Waterberry, who used that office, goes one step further and tells people to take at least some of it in person, in the city where they live, because that is where she found her career.
So the kid from Henderson is not really the problem. He is nineteen and he will be fine. The Veterans who did well at this mostly found one other person on campus who had also turned in a rifle, and the ones who struggled mostly went it alone.
Where to go from here
No advice from us, and no benefit rules: those belong to VA. These are places that exist and what each one does.
- UNLV Military and Veteran Services Center The UNLV office that gives student Veterans academic, social and administrative support and helps them use their education benefits. Ross D. Bryant, quoted above, leads it. 702-895-2290.
- CSN VETS Center (Veterans Education and Transition Services) The College of Southern Nevada office that certifies enrollment for VA education benefits and helps with benefit applications, advising and admission. 702-651-5060.
- VA: GI Bill Comparison Tool VA's own search for schools and employers with programs approved for Veterans benefits. It shows what your benefits would cover at each one, anywhere in the country.
- VA: Education and training benefits The official starting point for the GI Bill and other VA education benefits: what each program is, who qualifies and how to apply. The rules live here, not in this article.
A listing is not an endorsement.
If you are a Veteran in crisis or having thoughts of suicide, call 988 and press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line is free and confidential, 24 hours a day.
Go hear them say it
Every quote above links to the second it was said. Uriarte’s bubbles and Coffeen’s last two months are both worth the full telling. If you are in Southern Nevada, the campus offices and everything else we have checked are at Veteran resources in Las Vegas.
Stories quoted in this article
- Most Veterans Don’t Know Their Education Benefits, The Man Who’s Helped 9,000 Claim Them
- Every Lance Corporal Is Thinking It. Travis Jewell Says It. (@jewell_jits)
- Most Military Couples Fall Apart. Here's Why They Didn't.
- He Listened for 20 Years. Now He Tapes Ankles at a High School.
- Who Is the Man Behind Terminal Lance?
- She Donated Two Organs to Fellow Veterans.
- Adaptive Sports Saved My Life | Letoi Adams’ Journey
- The Woman Navy Pilot Who Became Addicted to History | Jennifer Bennie | A Walk With History
- Every Marine Defends Their Boot Camp. He's One of the Few Who Saw Both. / Randall Parkes USMC
- Would You Turn Down Special Forces Selection for Her? He Did. / Daniel Coffeen US Army
- You’ve Seen Her on Stranger Things. Here’s What Nobody Knew About This Navy Veteran.
- He Joined the National Guard to Work on Vehicles | Lucky Lopez
- Wounded Warrior Project: From Afghanistan to Finding Purpose with Juan Valdez