When Adam Delaney entered college in 2024, he’d already honed a remarkable set of skills. He wasn’t fresh off captaining a high school team or founding a club like many other first-years. Around the time most of his classmates were born, Delaney was 19, joining the Marines, and readying for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his 20s, he was concerned about life or death, rather than As or Fs.
That doesn’t mean navigating higher ed came easily when he decided to go back for his bachelor’s at 40. His time in the service made him supremely competent at tackling situations most civilians can’t imagine; it also made doing anything else afterwards challenging in a way most will never understand.
So what can colleges and universities do to give veterans like Delaney the greatest shot at success? At Arizona State University, the expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone. The approach, though, has gone beyond streamlining systems for processing G.I. benefits, as important as those are. Leadership at A.S.U.’s Pat Tillman Veterans Center is investing in a tailored and deeply relational approach to support, aiming to pull in those like Delaney and keep them — through to graduation.
While Delaney knew little about the Pat Tillman Center before enrolling at A.S.U., he now attributes it with restoring a sense of family he didn’t realize he’d missed. “It makes it feel more like we [veterans] belong than anything else,” he said. “Students who are there just out of high school or something like that, they all share that; they have that community with each other. So it was cool to have our own community as well.”
The Uphill Battle
In 2011, the Pat Tillman Center launched to offer military-connected students, who include current and former service members and their dependents, a designated space for advising and connecting with each other. Spanning 3,340 square feet in the basement of the student union on the main Tempe campus, the facility replaced the old face of A.S.U. veteran support: a window in the registrar’s office where students could go, slip their paperwork under the glass, and be on their way.
When the center opened, fewer than 2,000 military-connected students attended A.S.U. Now there are 25,000. A surge in remote learning has been key to the rapid expansion of both the university’s military population and its general one. Of the 194,000 students at America’s largest public university, more than a third are remote; at least 11,000 of them are military-connected.
The expansion of services for military-connected students has been critical amid the ballooning of that population — up nearly 15,000 in the last four years alone.
Shawn Banzhaf, the executive director of the Pat Tillman Center, believes the center has helped drive enrollment, whether online or off, by sending a message to service members that they matter here. “The more you can understand them, the more they feel like they belong, the more they’ll stay here, and the more they’ll tell their buddies about it,” he said. That strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: The more vets who come in chasing the promise of community, the stronger it gets — up to 25,000 and counting.
Of course, the numbers mean very little without the necessary support to back students up and bring them together. A point of pride for the Pat Tillman Center staff is that most served in the military, so they’re intimately familiar with the challenges their students can encounter. Banzhaf described a road through college riddled with fits and starts. In 1991, he enlisted in the Army National Reserve freshly out of high school, in large part to be able to pay for higher education. Once he found himself juggling a civilian career as a police officer, a family, and deployments, including 15 months in Iraq, he was forced to adapt. In the end, 20 years passed before he finished his degree.
Banzhaf said the challenges veterans encounter in college — and the Pat Tillman Center aims to address — are wide-ranging and sometimes surprising, especially to those on the outside. One of the most underestimated, he finds, is the financial strain. While the G.I. Bill may cover expenses like tuition and housing costs, it can leave others, from food to gas to medical bills, to pile up, while income has often stopped coming in.
Adam Delaney had been out of the Marines for more than a decade when he decided to go back to school. Nervous about abandoning his six-figure salary as a sales manager at O’Reilly Auto Parts, he turned to the Pat Tillman Center early on, finding staff could walk him through options — scholarships, work-study, federal aid — to lighten the load. They armed him with a detailed checklist to guide him through finding and completing the necessary forms. “They took the stress away,” he said. “I could do this without having a job and, you know, survive.”
Other concerns for student veterans are more cultural. They don’t just tend to be older or in a different life stage than their peers; they’re adjusting to a vastly different way of life. Military tradition emphasizes structure, disciple, and respect for hierarchy, Banzhaf said. “Veterans are used to you saying, ‘Do this, then go here. Do this, then go here and do this.’ And if you don’t do all these things, somebody gets killed.” In college, there are far fewer rules and almost no play-by-play instructions. Veterans often chafe, Banzhaf said, at the sight of students glued to their phones in class, ignoring their professor.
To help with this transition, A.S.U. offers specific orientations and a first-year College 101 course tailored to veterans’ needs and experiences. “Veterans don’t need to know how to live in dorms,” Banzhaf said. “They don’t need to know the best practices of staying away from the bars.” Instead, Student Success for Veterans covers issues like the “hidden curriculum” — rules and expectations often implicit in higher ed but unknown to those who have been out of school for a while. Students also learn how to help others navigate trauma, and Banzhaf said many come to realize the ones most in need of help are themselves.
Trauma is a critical barrier the Pat Tillman Center recognizes can impede veterans’ success. Delaney said his alcoholism, which spawned from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tours in the Middle East, led to two uncompleted degrees at two different community colleges before he got to A.S.U. That’s why he’s now pursuing a degree in social work to support other veterans on similar recovery journeys. It’s also why Banzhaf and his team continue to build out a range of programming for holistic wellbeing, from equine and art therapy to guitar and cooking classes. “If you can think of a way,” Banzhaf said, “we’re doing it.”
Trekking Through
One of the Pat Tillman Center’s most unique offerings is a program called Treks for Vets, which involves leading a group of student veterans in a rigorous, multi-day hiking trip. Banzhaf was part of a team that started the program after participating in a similar one with a Colorado-based nonprofit, Huts for Vets. He spent four, ten-hour days in the Aspen Mountains, climbing between 9,000 and 12,000 feet in elevation, and found the experience as rewarding as it was exhausting. In the wild he learned he hadn’t resolved his trauma from the war as completely as he’d thought.
Back at A.S.U., Banzhaf was committed to helping recreate the opportunity for his students. Now, twice a year, he takes a group of seven to 10 A.S.U. veterans to a base camp in northern Arizona for four days of trekking — and then some. The students do readings and discuss them together. They relish in nature, disconnected from technology. They participate in morning Qigong, a meditative movement practice. They eat nourishing meals.
The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service.
The bonds that form during this time are not so dissimilar from ones formed in military service, Banzhaf said. In both contexts, participants are pushed together in a uniquely close way and made vulnerable by grueling exercise. An important differentiator is that, on Treks for Vets, students have the opportunity to be open, whether on the trail or in organized conversations, about some of the most challenging and raw elements of their service. There’s no rank or title here, Banzhaf likes to remind them.
“All of a sudden these hard chargers that are used to not showing any emotion at all, because it could cost you your job or it could show that you’re weak and it could hurt your pride, start opening up because it really, truly doesn’t matter,” said Delaney, who was a participant in Treks for Vets before becoming a trip leader. He’s seen conversation topics run the gamut among his expeditions, though the through-line is veterans being open and connected in a rare and freeing way. Sometimes they talk about combat and trauma. Other times it’s the transition to college. “And that’s fine too,” Delaney said, “because it’s something people have been holding in, and we all sit and talk about it.”
Not everyone signs up for Treks for Vets wanting or expecting more than a camping trip. But most, Banzhaf suspects, “come because they need something.” Maybe it’s a change of scenery; maybe it’s connection or direction or meaning. Students who were contemplating suicide have told Banzhaf the trip kept some them from attempting. “It brought them to a place of hope and encouragement and community and all the things that all of us need anyway, but they just hadn’t found it, yet.”
Banzhaf’s only regret where Trek for Vets is concerned is that it can’t reach more students. Ideally, he said, he’d be running trips four times a year, but without the funding to train new staff, expansion just isn’t in the cards right now. At $15,000 per trip, Treks for Vets ends up eating up about a third of the Pat Tillman Center’s $100,000 annual operating budget, which depends on a per-student stipend from the Veterans Affairs Department. The university covers salaries for staff, but there’s always room for more. Where the V.A. recommends universities hire one School Certifying Official per 125 student G.I. Bill users, Banzhaf has just eight, attending to thousands.
The limitations on staff make the strength of connections among students that much more important. Delaney believes he’s never felt like a “number” among vets at A.S.U. because of the emphasis on peer support. In his first fall, it was students — some working for the Pat Tillman Center; others not — who were often his confidants to learn about new opportunities for military-connected students or talk through challenges. This semester, Delaney and a friend from Treks for Vets buddied up to take all the same classes after learning they share the same field of study. “We know who the other veterans are when we see them walking down the hallway like, ‘Yep, that guy’s a vet, or that girl’s a vet.’” he said. “You can spot them. That starts the conversation.”
You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.
