2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This full paper presents preliminary findings of a systematic scoping review of published literature related to the participation of undergraduate student veterans and service members (SVSM) in undergraduate STEM education. There are increasing national and global needs to recruit, train, and sustain an adaptable STEM workforce capable of addressing the 21st century socio-technical and environmental challenges using a variety of perspectives and talents. SVSM represent one vital source of future U.S. STEM workforce talent. Skills acquired during military service, such as leadership, teamwork, and technical skills, as well as the accumulation of a broad range of life experiences, suggest that SVSM are promising candidates to help meet this demand. This comprehensive scoping review of 51 sources characterizes current published literature and provides insights for conducting future empirical research examining undergraduate SVSM integration and participation in STEM higher education and careers.

We selected a scoping review methodology to characterize the breadth of literature related to SVSM in undergraduate STEM education in the United States. Over the past two decades, SVSM literature has re/emerged in higher education in response to an influx of U.S. veterans and service members in college—catalyzed by U.S. military actions of the past two decades and expanded federal educational benefits for veterans and current service members since 2008. We followed published procedures for systematically identifying and selecting literature to be included in this review. We ensured our methods aligned with PRISMA guidelines for performing systematic reviews and meta-analyses. We identified literature for this review using keywords and database-specific search terms for seven robust databases recommended by our STEM education librarian and available at our institution. We selected each article based on its compatibility with six pre-defined and one emergent inclusion criteria. We made efforts to ensure our literature searches were exhaustive by forward and backward snowballing all literature in our initial set. After finalizing our list of included literature, we are now categorizing elements of each study to support quantitative and qualitative content analysis and production of graphical displays of scoping findings.

Data syntheses from this scoping review are currently being used to map the empirical literature related to SVSM in undergraduate STEM education in the United States. Preliminary findings indicate that empirical research on SVSM participation in STEM education generally— and engineering education specifically—increased over the past 20 years, peaking sharply during the years 2016- 2021 and since receding. Notably, most studies were conducted in the context of engineering education, rather than other STEM disciplines or STEM generally. Over 70% of the sources are published in conference proceedings; increasingly research findings are being disseminated in archival journals. While many sources reported engaging participants from varying demographics and military affiliations, participant samples across sources are majority White and male, despite broad participant recruitment efforts. Insights for future research are discussed.