Junior Paul Salem is an average Duke student—he buys meals from the Great Hall and does homework in Perkins Library. But unlike most of his peers, Salem is a 24-year-old trained sniper who has instructed urban sniping while serving as a Marine in Iraq and the Horn of Africa.
Since President Barack Obama’s recent deployment of troops from Iraq— approximately 90,000 in the past 18 months as of August—the University has seen an increase in veteran applications at its undergraduate and graduate schools, University Registrar Bruce Cunningham wrote in an e-mail.
But the University is not expecting veteran enrollment to increase significantly in the immediate future, said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations.
Lieutenant Valerie VanHo, president of the Student Veterans Association at Duke and Grad ’10, said the application process is particularly difficult for active duty servicemen who want to go to college because many fill out applications and take their SATs while deployed in Iraq or on naval ships.
Duke has made some strides to improve its accessibility to veterans, but undergraduates who have served in the military are still a minority group among students on campus, Salem said.
The Yellow Ribbon effect
The veterans who do attend Duke, however, are eligible to receive financial support from the University.
Last year, Duke began providing funding for veteran students by joining the Department of Veterans Affairs Yellow Ribbon Program. The program allows institutions of higher learning to enter into an agreement with the government to provide funding for veterans which the VA then matches.
Since the University’s pledge, the number of students receiving veteran’s benefits has seen a “dramatic increase,” Cunningham said.
“Our veterans-benefit-receiving population has almost tripled in the last two years due to these new benefits.... Based on the number of inquiries we continue to receive I would expect that we will continue to see an increase in students using veteran’s benefits here at Duke,” he said. “Duke has made a very strong commitment to the Yellow Ribbon program and I don’t see any reason why that would diminish in the future.”
Funding school by school
Graduate and professional schools at the University provide more funding to students than Duke’s undergraduate schools under the Yellow Ribbon program.
For example, this year the Fuqua School of Business pledged $540,000—enough for 30 business students to receive $18,000 each, Cunningham said. The Sanford School of Public Policy offered $280,000 for 20 students to receive $14,000 each. At the undergraduate level, the Trinity School of Arts and Sciences and the Pratt School of Engineering offered $5,000 for 10 veterans—for a combined total of $50,000, Cunningham said.
The funds for veterans represent a significantly smaller sum than the scholarship money set aside for other scholarship purposes—including on a per-scholarship basis. In comparison, the University provided about $11.2 million in non-need-based athletic scholarships to 353 athletes, and $11.5 million to 220 merit award recipients last year, Alison Rabil, assistant vice provost and director for Financial Aid, wrote in an e-mail. Athletic-based scholarships make up 5 percent of student scholarship funding and merit-based scholarships make up 3 percent.
Schoenfeld said there are more graduate veteran students at Duke than undergraduates because the skills developed in the military are much more applicable at the graduate level.
“The Fuqua School of Business is a very popular destination for veterans,” Schoenfeld said. “We have a number of veterans who are enrolled at Fuqua and are in many cases among the top students because they have a tremendous amount of experience at a very young age, and they are used to the discipline and the rigor of being in very challenging circumstances.”
VanHo said sometimes the veterans’ work ethics and experiences are not as easy to reflect at the undergraduate admissions office as the graduate schools’ admissions offices.
University support for veterans
The University also provides other services to veterans beyond financial support. VanHo said Duke has a variety of programming that caters to the veteran community such as hosting speakers and holding campus appreciation days. Last year, U.S. Secretary of Veteran Affairs Eric Shinseki, Grad ’76, came to re-dedicate Duke’s war memorial and speak to student veterans.
Although Salem does not receive funding under the Yellow Ribbon Program, he said the University was extremely helpful after he received his acceptance. In one instance, Duke sent a request to the Marine Corps asking to allow Salem to return earlier to the U.S. so that he could be home for a month before moving onto East Campus.
Salem said that unlike many of his fellow Marines at other universities, he has found his peers to be “unbelievably respectful” of the fact that he has served in Iraq. He added that although some do not agree with the war in Iraq, he has not experience any ill will toward him as a result.
“My generation [of Marines] is lucky to have benefited from previous generations,” Salem said. “Even people who might be against the war in principle will always express an appreciation for the troops. I never sense any animosity towards me, even if there is a political disagreement with the war itself.”
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