Colleges Should Admit More Veterans

We implore America’s highly selective colleges to admit more veterans this coming year than last year.

Highly selective colleges should admit more veterans.

On this Independence Day, we — like the rebellious colonists of centuries ago — wish to make known our dream. And that dream is to help on a pro bono basis as many veterans of America’s military as possible each and every year earn admission to the highly selective colleges of their dreams. These are men and women who have, of their own volition, served our nation in uniform in the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, or Air Force. This is a dream that isn’t just the stuff of our imagination. We’ve been helping veterans earn admission to highly selective colleges each year. It’s just, well, we want to help even more.

And so on this day in which we declared our independence all those years ago, we call on highly selective colleges to do more to support our troops — not just with perfunctory acknowledgements of their sacrifice. Highly selective colleges should admit more veterans this year than they did last year and they should make that the goal every year going forward. Maybe their test scores will be low. Maybe they won’t even have an SAT or an ACT. Maybe their high school grades weren’t the strongest (although many veterans, of course, have strong high school grades and scores too). But nonetheless we ask these schools to do more, to overlook these data points if they happen to be low, to see the brave men and women behind these numbers. Every single highly selective college — even the ones that do so much for our veterans — can and must do more to support our troops. If they can all just admit one more veteran each year, then that would go a long way. Or maybe they can admit two more. Or three. We will absolutely push it!

So many veterans apply as transfer students. Highly selective colleges love to admit students with non-traditional backgrounds in the transfer round, students who just don’t end up in the regular high school applicant pool. What’s a more interesting, non-traditional background than serving your country in uniform at great personal sacrifice? Highly selective colleges should admit more veterans of America’s armed forces. Say it with us now. They can do more. They must do more. And we’ll aim to do more too this next year.