UCLA

Since 9/11, military veteran enrollment in college has increased rapidly, but much remains unknown about their experience in higher education. The federal government has knocked down significant financial barriers for many of these student veterans through benefits provided by the different iterations of the GI Bill. However, a high number still leave college without earning their degrees. Drawing upon three waves of cross-sectional data collected from the Higher Education Research Institute’s (HERI) Diverse Learning Environments (DLE) survey, this study used structural equation modeling (SEM) to demonstrate the extent to which student veterans’ perceptions of staff and faculty concern and attention, or validation, relates to their intent to persist at their respective four-year colleges or universities. This study tested and slightly modified established measures of validation (Hurtado, Cuellar, & Guillermo-Wann, 2011) for student veterans and non-veteran students with similar backgrounds. With these latent traits confirmed, this study examined the relationship between each group’s sense of validation and their persistence intentions, comparing structural differences. Rend�n’s (1994) theory of validation provided the framework for the main independent variable of interest, and Nora’s (2003) model of student engagement guided the selection of control variables used to model differences in students’ intent to persist.

Results indicate that validation is central to models predicting intent to persist for each group of college students, but a different mix of characteristics and experiences explained variation in intentions to persist for student veterans than for the matched sample of non-veteran, nontraditional students. Student veterans who experienced more validation from staff and faculty also had more confidence in their academic abilities, which, in turn, was related to being more likely to intend to return to the same campus for the following fall term. These factors serve to better connect students to campus, yet they compete with external influences, including work and family responsibilities, which have a tendency to pull student veterans away from their institutions. In addition to enhancing students’ persistence intentions, more frequently perceiving validation from faculty and staff also correlated with higher grades and a sense of belonging. These relationships remained when testing a structural model for a sub-sample of student veterans of color. For non-veteran students with similar backgrounds, validation had a direct link to intent to persist and to confidence in academic abilities. However, unlike student veterans, non-veteran students with greater academic confidence expressed intentions to leave their current institution by the start of the following fall term. Implications for the U.S. military, higher education policymakers, college and university leaders, faculty and staff include extending transition assistance to veterans as they separate, intentionally incorporating validation into trainings, and modeling inclusive teaching practices.