Increases in the student veteran population on college campuses since 2005 spurred a new era of scholarly activity and research on this population. The first wave of studies drew important initial attention to veterans while demonstrating that the field needs more salient conceptual models to understand and study the student veteran experience more holistically and evolve from concepts that only address transitions from the military to higher education (Hammond, 2015;Vacchi & Berger, 2014). A new wave of student veteran scholars (e.g., Downs, Hammond, Hullender, Jones, McBain, Minnis, Phillips, Vacchi) aims to explore beyond the area of veteran transitions into higher education and to examine the success of veterans in college from a more holistic perspective. Although these scholars agree that transitions are only the beginning to understanding student veteran success, they challenge the status quo by endorsing a worldview that avoids deficit modeling, not only for student veterans, but for all student populations.Frequently cited literature on student veterans (e.g., DiRamio, Ackerman, & Mitchell, 2008; Rumann & Hamrick, 2010) connects with traditional models of student retention, such as Tinto' s interactionalist theory (Tinto, 1975(Tinto, , 1993, which may be inappropriate given that veterans are nontraditional students. Tinto' s theory implies that students must adapt and integrate socially with a campus context in order to avoid departure, which may not be what is happening with student veterans. Tinto' s theory, being "near paradigmatic" (Braxton et al., 2013), struggles with psychometrically valid measures for his constructs (Smart, 2005); it is arguably most appropriate for traditional students (Berger, 2000) and of less value for exploring nontraditional student experiences in higher education, such as veterans. The nontraditional student retention model developed by Bean and Metzner (1985), which evolved from Tinto' s theory, has been successfully validated at the model level by further empirical research by Cabrera, NEW DIRECTIONS FOR INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, no. 171
