The institutional environment for student veterans in engineering

Abstract

Active military and student veterans navigate engineering education in ways both similar to and different from their civilian counterparts. This Work in Progress describes variation in institutional environments through interviews with campus administrators and inspection of university websites at four institutions. Three emerging themes are identified: 1) the presence/absence of key student policies, 2) variation in student support services, and 3) gaps in provision of such services. Interviews provide data on the challenges faced and assets brought by veterans, from the point of view of administrators. We find that serving veterans is an area of recent and increasing importance to these institutions and that the level of services offered is evolving to include veterans resource centers, training for students and faculty on veterans' issues, and web portals to access veteran-specific information.

Military Veteran Students’ Pathways in Engineering Education (Year 6)

“…During year six, we have continued with the dissemination of research results in a variety of venues for a range of audiences, including engineering educators in the US, engineering educators from across the world, student affairs administrators who work with veterans, the Student Veterans Association (SVA), and the general public [2,3]. In addition to this paper for the 2020 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference NSF Grantees Poster Session, this project has yielded three published journal articles [4,5,6] and seventeen published conference papers [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. We did a presentation at the 2019 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD) conference in April 2019 [24], a poster [25] at a sociology meeting, two conference special sessions at engineering education conferences [26,27] and three workshops for student affairs professionals and engineering educators [28,29,30].…”

Institutional Agents' Roles in Serving Student Veterans and Implications for Student Veterans in Engineering

“…In an earlier paper [3], we described the institutional environment for student veterans in engineering, providing preliminary results from interviews with institutional agents (IAs) and from our analysis of institutional websites. We found that serving veterans was an area of increasing importance at our study institutions and that the level of services offered is evolving to include veterans' resource centers, training for students and faculty on veterans' issues, and web portals to access veteran-specific information.…”

Leaving Civil Engineering: Examining the Intersections of Gender, Disability, and Professional Identity

“…These factors include contextual characteristics such as academic climate [11] and access to resources [12] that intersect with individual factors related to identity that are often focused on race and gender. Recent work in engineering education has begun to expand on this research to examine contextual differences and nuance across engineering disciplines [13]- [15] and broaden studies to include students from low socioeconomic families [16], veterans [17], [18], first generation college students [19], and the LGBTQ+ communities [20]- [22]. However, research in these areas have not yet been integrated into civil engineering.…”