Colleges Supporting Our Troops

On this Memorial Day weekend, we wish to honor our American troops — the men and women who have courageously served our nation in uniform. But we want to do more than simply honor our troops. We also want to help them achieve the educations they seek once their service is complete. And so on this Memorial Day weekend, Ivy Coach reaffirms its longstanding commitment to helping as many veterans as we can each and every year earn admission to the highly selective colleges they so deserve to attend.

Colleges across America can and must do more to admit more of our veterans.

Highly selective colleges, like the Ivy League colleges, are all about diversity — diversity based on race, religion, on national origin, sexual orientation, on opinion, and more. It’s diversity of opinion that we wish to highlight now. When a veteran of the United States military is in a political science class at a highly selective college, that veteran can offer insight on foreign policy, on military intervention, on an appreciation of other cultures that those who have never served could never hope to offer. Their experiences, their insights, their personal narratives add vitality to debate, to classroom discussion that every highly selective college should crave.

And so on this Memorial Day weekend, we implore colleges — all colleges from the most highly selective on down — to do what they can to offer admission to more veterans. Some great colleges really do set the standard in this department — schools like Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill just to name a few — but there is more work to be done. The Post-9/11 G.I. Bill was wonderful federal legislation that gave hope to many of our veterans that they could pursue their educations upon the completion of their military service. But aid for college is one thing. Offering admission to these schools is another. May all highly selective colleges serve our men and women in uniform by opening up more slots for these folks who’ve done so much for us.