Posted by Tina Grazier

The following is a preview of a truly wonderful story from MSNBC about returning vets who are attending college:

Students like Nathaniel Donnelly, a former Marine who served in Iraq, insist they don’t flaunt their military service but are happy to talk about it in social settings or classrooms. Many transform their leadership training from the military to campus organizations. Gary Hirsch, a former Marine who graduated last spring with a top academic award, was involved in no fewer than nine different extracurricular groups.

“If I could have 50 percent of our student body be veterans, I would,” said Sandra Cook, executive director of enrollment services at San Diego State, which gives veterans special consideration in admissions. “Maybe they didn’t shine in high school, but they have that experience.”

Increasingly, veterans are looked to as classroom and campus leaders. Their respect for rules can rub off on students. And they can often make firsthand contributions to classroom discussions on topics that even professors can’t provide.

Veterans “offer a real rubber-meets-the-road approach that is unique in higher education,” said Jeffrey McIllwain, who teaches national security courses at San Diego State, and says veterans always stay on top of the voluminous readings he assigns. “Many professors have a lot of theory, and these students bring a wealth of experience to test that theory in really unique ways.”

Classroom discussions about, say, the surge in Iraq or the nature of the insurgency often bounce aimlessly around, McIllwain says. “Then you have a student come in and talk about how he was responsible for trying to co-opt a Sunni tribe to help the coalition,” he said. Donnelly recalls a class on nuclear weapons security where the professor grilled a student who had served in a counterintelligence unit working on that very issue. Hirsch, who served on President Bush’s Marine One helicopter crew, is often asked about the president.

Read the entire story, “Colleges eagerly welcome war veterans”