This engineering education research project seeks to create veterans' communities of interest that collaborate across Texas A&M Univeristy and with its partners to enhance the educational experience and number of veterans pursuing B.S. engineering degrees at TAMU. These communities will enable the project team to investigate challenges for veteran students, leverage and integrate existing student services, and establish academic enhancements that meet the needs of veterans. Local partner colleges and military bases will participate in the project. The project team plans to use an industrial engineering approach of integrating proven actions, which may provide clear lessons to universities on attracting and retaining veterans as well as the one time and recurring costs of doing so.
The broader significance and importance of this project is to apply the lessons on how to recruit military personnel who are leaving service to inform practice and increase the pipeline into engineering. The project will conduct interview of veteran students to discover barriers to enrollment, retention, and graduation; this approach could provide useful information to a range of practitioners. Overall, the main benefits to society are increasing the enrollment of under-represented student populations in engineering and increasing the enrollment of student in engineering.
