Bethany Russell grew up in Bristol, Tennessee, and served as a U.S. Army intelligence officer before enrolling in a joint master's program at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School of Government. The 30-year old currently studies U.S. economic competition with China and says, even though she feels welcome on campus, her peers struggle to relate to her.
"It's clear that my classmates don't necessarily have the frame of reference to understand where I'm coming from," she said. "There aren't that many [veterans] here."
University administrators want to change that.
This fall, the Kennedy School launched the largest scholarship campaign in its history to bring more military veterans to Cambridge. The school says the effort is a way to broaden opinions on campus amid mounting criticism that Harvard and other colleges are too liberal and don't expose students to a wide enough range of views.
As a whole, veterans tend to be more Republican. A 2024 Pew Research analysis found that 63% of veteran voters identify with or lean toward the Republican Party, compared with 35% who identify as or lean Democratic.
The new program, called the American Service Fellowship, offers veterans and other mid-career public servants like firefighters and police officers a fully-funded path to get a one-year master's degree in public administration. The school says it will cover the full cost of attendance even for veterans who receive federal GI benefits.
To promote it, the Kennedy School has sent thousands of letters to veterans organizations, police and fire departments, and civil service unions. It's also doing dozens of interviews with local television stations in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, Jackson, Tennessee, and Bridgeport, West Virginia.
"It's fun because we're getting to go to places where people don't expect to see Harvard," said Adam Farina, the Kennedy School's chief communications officer. "What we need are great leaders to step into this moment, lead us forward and drive real change in our communities and for our country."
Harvard has about 400 veterans on campus, less than 2% of its student body. The effort to boost those numbers is part of a larger move to recruit more students from rural areas across the country. It comes as conservative politicians have accused colleges of being too expensive and too out of touch with most Americans.
A recent Pew Research Center survey finds 70% of people now say higher education is headed in the wrong direction — up from 56% just five years ago. The Trump administration has seized on that growing discontent, urging schools to enroll more domestic students, including veterans, and fewer international ones.
Kevin Bae is an Army veteran and retired CIA officer who graduated in 2005 from the Kennedy School. Today, two-thirds of the school's students are from abroad. Bae says that's an imbalance that colleges can't ignore.
"When the numbers get so lopsided that it starts raising questions in terms of who ultimately is our target audience, that's potentially a valid re-calculation that higher ed across the board should be making," he said.
Bae agrees with the way Harvard is responding to some of the criticism, and said the Kennedy School's focus on public policy and government relations could appeal to many veterans. Still, he said other colleges could do a lot more to attract vets. That could include giving them more credit for their military and work experience so it doesn't take them so long to receive a degree. He added there needs to be more scholarship opportunities to make college worthwhile for vets who could otherwise find a job right after serving.
"Everyone these days has to pay the bills," he said. "It is a hard math problem."
At the University of Montana, President Seth Bodnar — a West Point graduate and former Green Beret — has made veteran enrollment an institutional mission. The public university now counts more than 500 vets and active-duty service members among its 10,000 students. That's about 5% of the student body. The school says that's several percentage points higher than when Bodnar took the job in 2018.
Nationally, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, student veterans make up approximately 6% of undergraduate college students and 7% of graduate students.
Other schools have had a harder time enrolling veterans. Administrators at Brown University said the school has struggled to shed a reputation as being less welcoming to members of the military following decades of anti-war protests. For instance, Brown didn't formally renew ties with ROTC until 2016, decades after the programs were banished from campus during the Vietnam War.
The school has set out to change that, offering undergraduate scholarships to veterans that pay for any expenses not covered by their GI benefits. Still, today Brown counts 113 vets as students, less than 1% of its student body. Part of the issue is spreading the word.
Mac Manning — who directs Brown's Office of Military Affiliated Students and served in the U.S. Marine Corps — said the military is "a big telephone game" and service members speak with each other about their future plans. He said Brown isn't usually part of those conversations. That's why this week the university is announcing it's also expanding its graduate scholarships for veterans.
"This will just give more individuals, whether they be veterans or dependents that have transferred educational benefits, the opportunity to attend Brown at very little out-of-pocket costs," he said.
At Harvard, Bethany Russell — the Army veteran from Tennessee — plans to finish her business and public policy degrees next spring. She'll then start a job at a defense technology company in Washington, D.C.
Russell hopes to eventually transition to a career in public policy focused on national security and relations with China. She said her degree from Harvard will be critical to doing that.
"I wanted to go to grad school and just learn more about what was out there," she said. "My time in the military gave me experience from the receiving end of public policy but not necessarily shaping it."
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