If it were not for a flash flood in Las Vegas, Patrick Hood might never have found himself on the other side of the country attending Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Hood was on his way back from class at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) when the fine weather abruptly deteriorated into a violent rainstorm.
He was in a stairwell when the flood waters started cascading down and when the deluge subsided, he was left with a broken leg. While he was laid up from his injury, Hood saw a call to apply to Vassar College through the Posse Veterans Foundation on a website for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “I joked that there was no chance in hell I would ever be accepted,” he says.
After going through the admissions process, he was admitted to the college, where he now majors in science, technology and society, with a minor in economics.
“It’s definitely very interesting to go from one extreme to the other, having been at the stereotypical large school format at UNLV, where there’s 200 kids in a class, and then to be at Vassar, where there’s a max of 30 students in a class,” he says. “I like the classroom environment here; it’s good to get to know your fellow classmates.”
Hood’s path to Vassar was also exceptional in that he was one of 10 students in Vassar’s first cohort of veterans brought to the college through the Posse Foundation.
Encouraging veteran education
Veterans make up only a tiny fraction of the undergraduate student population at many of the nation’s well-resourced Ivies and other private elites. They have the option of attending private, nonprofit colleges using Post-9/11 GI Bill funds through the Yellow Ribbon Program, which pays for all resident tuition and fees for public schools and a certain amount in tuition and fees at private schools. Despite the incentives to do so, they are simply not applying in large numbers, officials at elite colleges say.
