Blog
May 15, 2025
Recent Data Show Minimal Change in Veterans Enrollment Patterns
In October 2023, we published an analysis of GI bill beneficiary data that showed that these students were shifting away from for-profit institutions toward four-year public and private not-for-profit institutions, but in doing so were still not enrolling at the four-year institutions where they were most likely to graduate. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recently released updated data on GI bill beneficiaries’ enrollment patterns, allowing us to explore whether these trends have persisted.[1] In short, trends…
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May 5, 2025
Examining the New Carnegie Student Access and Earnings Classification at Four-Year Colleges and Universities
A bachelor’s degree remains a key lever to achieve economic success. Median earnings disaggregated by educational attainment demonstrate the importance of a bachelor’s degree for securing a job and making strong earnings. The difference in median weekly earnings of a person with a high school degree ($930) compared to someone with a bachelor’s degree ($1,543) adds up to an additional $32,000 over one year. This wage premium grows even larger as a person advances in their career. Despite…
January 21, 2025
Policies to Improve the Effect of the Endowment Tax on the Public Good
In 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act imposed a 1.4 percent excise tax on net investment earnings of a set of private colleges and universities that meet certain conditions. Currently, the excise tax applies to private colleges and universities that have at least 500 students and assets per student greater than $500,000, in practice reaching highly selective, high-endowment schools.[1] In 2023, 56 institutions were subject to the tax and paid a total of $380 million.[2] The stated…
October 31, 2024
Prospective Student Veterans Face Complex Choices on the Journey to a Bachelor’s Degree
As Veteran’s Day approaches, there is renewed attention paid to those individuals who have served in our nation’s military and to the ways our nation repays that service. The majority of military service members often cite education benefits as one of their primary motivations for joining the military. However, once they leave the service, many veterans are not making best use of those benefits due to undermatching, whereby students attend institutions where they…
October 31, 2024
From Service to Study
Exploring Barriers and Expanding Opportunities for Veterans in Higher Education
Introduction On Thursday, September 19, 2024 in New York City, The Teagle Foundation, Warrior Scholar Project (WSP), and Ithaka S+R convened a group of higher education and philanthropic leaders for an off-the-record, roundtable discussion focused on the unique value military veterans bring to college campuses, the barriers institutions face in recruiting and supporting them, and the role nonprofit partners and education funders could play in bolstering these efforts. Committed to the proposition that an expansion of postsecondary educational opportunities for…
November 10, 2023
What’s Next? Ideas for Future Exploration in Student Veteran Access and Success
This October, we embarked on a blog series focusing on the experiences of student veterans in higher education, sharing takeaways from our conversations with eight campus-based programs and non-profit organizations that support student veterans’ college success alongside the latest enrollment data. Those conversations provided insights into many best practices that institutions can employ to recruit, enroll, and graduate veteran students, while also introducing new questions and ideas for future work. In this installment, we identify…
October 17, 2023
Best Practices at the Institutional Level
Enrolling and Supporting Student Veterans
Last month, my colleagues and I spoke with institutional representatives from five different institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M, and the University of Chicago. These institutions all have a strong commitment to student veteran enrollment, but are at different stages of the process. For example, Cornell and UChicago have been actively scaling up the enrollment of veterans over the last few years, while Texas A&M has long enrolled many hundreds of veterans each year. At Columbia and…
October 12, 2023
Veterans Enrollment: What Do the Data Show?
In 2019, Ithaka S+R published a paper discussing the underrepresentation of student veterans at high-graduation-rate institutions and outlining the various barriers—ranging from financial aid policies to transfer credit limitations—that prevent veterans from enrolling in such institutions. As we explained in that paper, these barriers partly explain why, as of 2015-16, only one in 10 veterans using GI Bill benefits were enrolling at institutions with graduation rates above 70 percent, while approximately one-third of veterans were using GI Bill benefits…
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October 12, 2023
Student Veteran Blog Series
Introduction and Overview
The ending of the formal COVID-19 public health emergency offers an opportunity to reflect on how the upheaval of the past few years has impacted many facets of life and society, including higher education. At Ithaka S+R, we are taking this opportunity to revisit some of our previous work focused on the experiences of student veterans (see note on language below) that was completed just prior to the…
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February 3, 2022
An Interview with Dr. Jay Darr, Director of University Counseling Center at the University of Pittsburgh
A Deep Dive on the Importance of Mental Health and Its Shared Responsibility Across Campus
Dr. Jay Darr is the Director of the University Counseling Center (UCC) at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), a member of the American Talent Initiative’s (ATI) Academic Equity Community of Practice (CoP). As part of our Academic Equity Interview Blog series (for our first post we interviewed Claremont McKenna’s Nyree Gray on campus climate), we asked Dr. Darr to help…
September 27, 2021
An Interview with Nyree Gray, Chief Civil Rights Officer at Claremont McKenna
A deep dive on campus climate and how the Campus Climate Survey can help build a more equitable academic and social environment
Nyree Gray is associate vice president and chief civil rights officer at Claremont McKenna College (CMC). She has previously presented on a webinar for the American Talent Initiative (ATI) Academic Equity Community of Practice (CoP) and at the 2021 Academic Equity CoP Summer Institute, focusing on the intersection between campus climate and curriculum. In particular, she’s shared how she evaluates insights gained from…
July 8, 2021
Provocative, Productive, and Collaborative: The 2021 Academic Equity Summer Institute
We gratefully acknowledge the many individuals who devoted their time, energy, and expertise to the 2021 summer institute and the insights shared below, including Randall Bass, Heidi Elmendorf, Mark Joy, Susannah McGowan, and Brittany Toscano Gore of Georgetown University, Katie Brock and Ulili Emore of the University of Texas at Austin, and Nathaniel Holmes and Richard Peters of Xavier University of Louisiana. The ongoing work of the ATI academic equity community of practice would not be possible without them. Introduction…
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October 28, 2020
Building Support for Student Veteran Enrollment
New Practice Brief from the American Talent Initiative
Today, we are excited to release Making the Case for Student Veterans: Building Support for Student Veteran Enrollment. This publication is the first brief in a series from the American Talent Initiative (ATI) focused on helping college and university leaders lay the groundwork for enrolling, supporting, and graduating more student veterans. Student veterans are significantly underrepresented at the colleges…
October 21, 2020
Announcing ATI’s Academic Equity Community of Practice
Recent months have highlighted long-standing inequities within our nation’s postsecondary education system. The barriers facing historically underserved student populations are not limited to the admissions and enrollment process, but extend throughout the academic experience. For the members of the American Talent Initiative (ATI), an alliance of high-graduation-rate colleges and universities committed to expanding access and opportunity for low- and middle-income students, combating inequities that exist throughout the student lifecycle is essential to fulfilling our collective goals. Today, we…
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August 12, 2020
Expanding Access and Opportunity Through Community-Based Organization-College Partnerships
New Report from the American Talent Initiative and College Greenlight
Today, the American Talent Initiative (ATI) and College Greenlight released a new report that highlights how community-based organizations (CBOs) and colleges can partner to expand access and opportunity for students from lower-income backgrounds. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially now, CBOs provide a leg up to tens of thousands of talented lower-income students nationwide who aspire to pursue a postsecondary education, but face…
August 3, 2020
Engaging and Supporting Prospective Students
How Can Institutions Draw Upon the Principles of Near-Peer Advising?
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the typical college admissions experience. At the same time, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others have drawn heightened attention to the structural and institutional racism that exists within our educational system and the impact this has on our students who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). Students preparing to enter college for the first time in Fall 2020 have made enrollment choices as the specifics of…
June 24, 2020
The Great Recession Playbook is Gone
Why Higher Ed Needs Government Support to Survive
In periods of crisis, we often look to history to guide us. Throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic, experts have drawn comparisons to the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, and most recently, the 2008 Great Recession. Given its recency, many in the higher education community rely on their experiences in the Great Recession to both project the financial consequences of the widespread disruption of COVID-19 and to seek inspiration for effective responses. Now that we have officially entered an…
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June 18, 2020
Student Veterans Need Targeted Support Due to COVID-19 Educational Disruptions
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the educational experiences of millions of college students around the country, including for students who are US military veterans. Under normal circumstances, student veterans must overcome significant structural barriers to enroll and complete college: veteran students are more likely than civilian students to be Black, Indigenous, and people of color, the first in their families to go to college, and have families of their own. Students with these attributes…
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April 27, 2020
Online Learning During COVID-19
Digital and Educational Divides Have Similar Boundaries
In 2018, nearly 78 percent of households in America had a desktop or laptop computer and 74 percent had a broadband Internet subscription, a significant increase in digital access over the last two decades. Yet, millions of Americans are without access, and the distribution is wildly uneven across geographic regions (as well as demographic subgroups). A digital divide has existed in America for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed it and made it more relevant than ever…
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April 23, 2020
Going Test-Optional with Equity in Mind
Colleges and universities across the nation are revisiting nearly every aspect of their operations in order to best respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of SAT and ACT administration changes and cancellations, at least 70 colleges and university systems have implemented test-optional policies, which either eliminate the requirement for prospective students to submit standardized test scores or…