The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1 - 178

Wade G. Livingston • David A. Scott • Pamela A. Havice • Tony W. Cawthon

they undergo when enrolling in college and highlight the burgeoning body of literature about student veterans, focusing specifically on livingston’s findings regarding their social transitions. Practical implications for working with student veterans conclude the article.

STUDENT VETERANS’ TRANSITION TO COLLEGE
though the g.i. Bill was implemented in the mid-1940s and student veterans enrolled in large numbers throughout the 1940s and 1950s, there is little literature from that era directly related to the student veteran experience in college. in fact, the literature remained sparse through the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the First gulf War. the wars in afghanistan and iraq prompted an influx of veterans on campuses in the early 2000s, which was accompanied by a renewed interest in veterans and their experiences in college. this renewed interest concerned the transitions that veterans make when deploying or when re-enrolling in college. much of this literature utilized schlossberg’s (1984) theory of adult transitions to provide a theoretical rationale for explaining and predicting veterans’ adjustment from military to college life. diramio, ackerman, and mitchell (2008) initially investigated combat veterans’ transitions using schlossberg’s theory and found that veterans articulated their military-to-college transition in a manner that complemented the concept of Moving In, Moving Through, Moving Out as articulated by schlossberg, lynch, and chickering (1989). diramio et al. (2008) highlighted the Moving In phase to explain how veterans coped with college enrollment and to showcase their
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specific needs, the most important of which was an interconnected institutional approach for identifying and assisting them. Veterans need a point person to orient them to college and require guidance in terms of financial aid, counseling, disability support, academic advising, and social connectedness. moreover, institutional research is needed to continue to identify veterans’ needs and to appropriately integrate services and interventions. diramio et al.’s (2008) research is important because it precipitated several studies that addressed student veterans’ transitions in a similar manner. livingston (2009) studied the academic and social transitions of re-enrolling student veterans at a four-year public university. He found that they tend to congregate with fellow student veterans and veteran faculty members for academic and social support and, otherwise, attempt to blend in to achieve the typical college experience. due to their military identity, participants in this study exhibited elements of pride, humility, and perseverance which, in many cases, deterred them from socializing with non-military peers or using institutional support mechanisms such as counseling and tutoring services. in a similar study, rumann (2010) examined re-enrolling student veterans in community colleges and revealed the need for integrated institutional support involving these students and their family members. He noted that veterans display increased maturity, changes in their perspective, and the desire to flesh out their identity between being a soldier and being a student. student veterans’ navigation of military and student identity is a pervasive theme in the literature. Bauman (2009) found that veterans were able to balance their identity

The Journal of College and universiTy sTudenT housing

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1