Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1111/hequ.70067

Publication Title

Higher Education Quarterly

Volume

79

Issue

4

Pages

e70067 (1-15)

Abstract

This 5‐year research project was based on an NSF S‐STEM research grant (1742118) focused on student veteran education and workforce preparation. We addressed STEM workforce and defence community needs by providing targeted scholarships and support for veteran students pursuing engineering degrees. Our aim was to enhance the workforce by improving access and success rates through financial and institutional support, while developing evidence‐based practices for recruitment, retention and graduation of student veterans. Through targeted interventions, we examined obstacles student veterans face in education and in engineering programs and increased their sense of camaraderie, career awareness, engineering identity, professional development, financial security and engineering self‐efficacy. Our targeted intervention was successful on all six factors. We provide implications for practice, policy and research, as well as future research areas to continue this important work.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Data Availability

Article states: "The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions."

ORCID

0000-0003-4653-3008 (Bullington), 0000-0002-4292-4039 (Tomovic), 0000-0002-8626-903X (Jovanovic)

Original Publication Citation

Bullington, K., Tomovic, C., Dean, A., & Jovanovic, V. (2025). A pathway to completion: Student veterans pursuing engineering degrees. Higher Education Quarterly, 79(4), 1-15, Article e70067. https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.70067

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