2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Military students (undergraduates who are U.S. military veterans and/or who serve in the U.S. Armed Forces, such as in the Reserves and National Guard, while attending college), continue to be an underserved and understudied population in engineering education. The research with this population that currently exists has largely been conducted at colleges and universities that are a) recognized for their superior support for military students and/or b) located in close proximity to a U.S. military installation and, thus, are situated within a supportive military community outside of school. Little research, however, has been conducted in the context of colleges and universities that provide more limited support for military students or are not located near military bases, such as many land-grant colleges and universities in the western region of the United States. Despite this research gap, there is both a need and desire to increase awareness and support for military students at these institutions.

This study has two main goals: 1) to understand the awareness and perceptions that institutional agents (faculty, staff, administration, advisors, resource officers, etc.)) possess regarding military students in engineering at public institutions in the western United States and 2) to synthesize promising practices used to support military students at these institutions. To meet these goals, this study is guided by the following research questions:

1. How do institutional agents describe their awareness of military students’ presence and needs for support in engineering and how does this awareness relate to institutional agent background and role?
2. How do institutional agents describe their perceptions of the assets, capabilities, and identities that military students bring to engineering and how do these perceptions relate to institutional agent background and role?
3. What promising practices exist for supporting military students in engineering and how do institutional agents describe gaps, if any, in these practices?

Institutional agents who work with military students across five 2- and 4- yr public institutions in the western United States were purposefully selected in accordance with an approved Institutional Review Board protocol. Using an emergent qualitative research methodology based in constructivist grounded theory methods, single, semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant. Interview transcripts were then coded using constant comparative analysis (CCA) and the given research questions.

Preliminary results suggest that, while most participants shared similar perceptions of the assets and capabilities military students bring to higher education, institutional agent awareness of the presence and needs of military students on campus and in engineering varied greatly depending on the institutional agent’s background and role at the institutions. Additionally, promising practices for supporting military students vary in kind and amount across institutions. This paper reports on the ways that institutional agent awareness and support vary between universities and recommends ways to synthesize promising practices from each institution to improve support for military students as they pursue engineering degrees.