Let's Actually Support Active Duty Military Students

Three years ago a select group of private universities gathered with officials from the Department of Defense and the VA to consider how higher education and the military could better serve active duty and veteran students. Ideas were traded and everyone left talking about momentum and a call to action. Three years later, we have a few press releases and a stale list of recycled pledges.

What was missing in those discussions was addressing the most significant challenge: active duty students don't control their own calendar. When orders, assignments and responsibilities pull a solider away from their studies, the burden of managing that chaos still falls on them. They need to email their professor, fill out the forms, loop in the registrar, and hope nobody flags their absence as unexcused before the paperwork clears.

I've imagined an uncommon (and highly unpopular) model for better serving our active duty students. What if we stopped asking them to report their own disruption and permitted the university to plug directly into the systems that manage and document the disruptions? The DoD already tracks duty status through platforms like milConnect and DEERS. Imagine a university that is permitted to secure a data sharing agreement, with the student's consent at enrollment, that lets its SIS read duty status changes the same way it already reads GI Bill eligibility through the VA. When a set of orders gets cut, the student advising platform flags the disruption so the instructor doesn't tag the student absent and the student's status automatically moves to "paused." No forms and no waiting on an advisor to confirm that they've received your email.

The objection I've heard to this model is that no university wants to or can afford to build and manage an interface into DoD personnel systems. It's a reasonable objection, but smaller versions of this already exist. Base education offices maintain their own records of who is where and for how long. A university with real partnerships, not just a recruiting table at the base education center, could start there. Pull duty status updates from the education services officer instead of the student. You get the same outcome of enhanced service and support with a lighter lift. Like much of what we can be doing in higher ed to rethink how we do what we do, this one isn't hard.