than in college that it can catch us off guard. It caught me off guard when I was going to grad school,” Cass said.
Uvize’s community features will help veterans learn from fellow students who have confronted the same issues.
“Our theory is that for veterans on campus, if they’re going through any sort of transitional issues, someone else on the campus has been through it before them and can help them,” Cass said.
The challenges can discourage veterans from continuing their studies, leading to lower graduation rates than traditional students, although just how low is in dispute.
Uvize doesn’t quote graduation rates because Cass believes the studies that have been done are inconclusive and show wildly different results. Instead of focusing on the problem of academic achievement, people get caught up in the validity of competing studies, he wrote in a post on Uvize’s blog.
He expanded on that in an interview.
“It’s very controversial, which is why we don’t quote them anymore,” Cass said. “No one really agrees about the graduation rate, but there’s one thing we all agree on, and that is it’s not high enough.”
For the record, the Student Veterans Association in March released a report that found that 51.7 percent of veterans who use government benefits programs such as the GI Bill receive degrees or complete certification programs. That’s similar to the rate for traditional students.
The report did find that it often took longer for veterans to complete their degree programs. The report was conducted with help from the U.S. Veterans Administration and the National Student Clearinghouse.
