welcome to the secrets of college planning i'm your host anthony yuba and today we're going to get some insight into the warrior scholar project my guest today is sid ellington he's the executive director for the warrior scholar project and welcome to the show i anthony it's great to be here thanks for having me flora no problem so usually i start my guess where did you go to college so where do you go so i grew up in western oklahoma in farm country and went off to the big school the university of and then after that you know i transitioned out i had my own transition i took the g i bill and i went to grad school and after grad school i wanted to keep serving in some capacity so i joined teach for america and i spent five years with teach for america spent three years in the classroom in the inner city schools in new orleans not too far after remove from hurricane katrina and then teach for america kick me upstairs to the national staff where i was running there are better ins outreach initiative out of washington d c that's how i heard about the warrior scott a project i met jessie rising our founder and decided this was a good place to finish up my career great  so let's go into the warrior scholar project what exactly is it and how does it work well the warriors got a project we're kind of unique in the field of veteran service organizations  seven thousand of them out there and that aren't a lot a lot of organizations are helping veterans but very very few are helping veterans it's especially on the enlisted side in the higher education space so we've got this you know this tremendous benefit it's the post nine eleven g i bill congress is just in the president just signed into law the forever but they're called the forever g i bill which is a modification to post nine eleven g i bill and it's a very generous benefit and unfortunately when soldiers sailors airmen and marines are going through a transition out of service with the goal of going back to college or going to college attending most most of our enlisted folks are first generation college students there's not a lot of help in explaining to the veteran the higher education landscape department of defense department of veterans affairs or focus rightly so on veteran mental health issues i'm sure that you're that you've heard the you know the data point there are some twenty two veterans commit suicide every single day so that's a big issue with the v a and certainly with the department of defense veteran homelessness you met medical in general and veteran employment transition out of service and into gainful employment the general thinking is that because we've got this incredibly generous post nine eleven g i bill is this amazing benefit then you know add to higher education is done you take the g i bill and you go to college well things have changed a lot since the world war two generation at the g i bill now you've got online for profit schools there are a plethora of different options and a lot of these organizations are very very good you know at recruiting so what winds up happening is that about forty percent of our post nine eleven g i bill funds each year winding up in the hands of your for profit institutions many of these are not regionally accredited schools and in many cases the veteran if he or she is able to finish and graduate and the graduation numbers it's that some of these schools are very very low they wind up with with a degree that's not very marketable especially in today's highly highly competitive job market so that's where we come in we see our and listed veterans as you know problem solvers team builders you know that they're highly adaptable you know they're used to making decisions under stressful conditions they're their civic assets you couple that with a top tier education from great school like like princeton university and you have you know a civic leader you know for the next generation so that's kind of where we fit and we help with that transition out of service understanding that most of our enlisted folks are first generation college students and then we do three things we use a boot camp format on campus with the schools in partnership with the schools and what we're doing is we're trying to build a skill bridge from enlisted service to a top tier institution like princeton we're trying to increase their academic confidence level you know engaging them with princeton professors princeton writing instructors having class on campus so that they come away from that experience thinking you know i can really do this and the last piece is to make them a better informed consumer of higher education so they know the difference between a school like princeton and an online for profit you know no regionally accredited school that's kind of how we fit in we see ourselves our theory of change is to help deal the civic leaders of tomorrow and we believe that doing that with military experience and everything that that entails and the is it just princeton university you're in or there are in all the colleges i'm name dropping princeton because you know you're in new jersey and right you know that's the local school for your audience but we're at fifteen campuses across the nation where  we're at harvard we're at mit we're at notre dame you know we're at texas a and m university where georgetown fifteen campuses and basically the format of our boot camp our academic boot camp is that  the warrior scholars are living in the dormitories on campus there in the dining facilities on campus they're going to class on campus and engaging with that university or colleges you know professors and so they're actually getting that experience that hands on experience of what it is like to be a student at yale or harvard or mit or princeton you know for a one week or two week period we have our two persians now and they come out of that you know just with a completely transformed view of what they're capable of and what options are available to them now what's the requirements for for these  military people to get into these schools because these are highly academic schools so what's the requirement to get in there is no requirement other than you need a clean d d for two fourteen and what i mean by that is that you know you need to have served honorably and you know actually be a veteran you know so we check on that and you need to have the desire we're not looking for s a t s scores or anything like that we truly believe that and all we are trying to do is show them the pathway to do that build their confidence and show them that yes you can you can apply princeton and you can apply to yale or harvard or notre dame and you can get in a nd we have students alumni from our program in the top schools all over the country you know including stanford which is not a partner of ours for now the students that are in the  military what's the average age of the students when they go to college are these there are thirty forty year olds are these the twenty twenty five year old that's a great question generally speaking they're the younger ones you know they're twenty to twenty or  know twenty three twenty six twenty seven but it does vary i mean we have individuals that have read that have retired after twenty year stent we have individuals that spent ten years eleven years twelve years we've got combat veterans and then we've got you know combat support folks generally speaking though you're talking about the individual who enlisted for four years obtain g i bill benefits and now is ready to move on to the next phase of their life transition of where they're going we started out in two thousand and twelve at yale with nine or your scholars of those nine warriors scholars four of them are eddie had their degree the it was the pilot program just to see if it would work so we're just now getting our first graduates all of our graduates you know we just had a recent graduate from dartmouth university who graduated last spring he's now at stanford you know doing an internship and so what we're trying to do for the phase two piece is make those partnerships and make those connections with industry whether that be northrop grumman whether that be nasa we've had you know one of our individuals has done in terms ship with nasa we've had one of our alumni do an internship with at the white house when barack obama was our president we've had individuals that you know participate in organizations like the washington center or hill vets and yes the way i look at it is that we haven't done our job if we don't funnel these individuals and provide follow on opportunities whether that be employment or that be an term ship so that they can move to the next level and truly become you know one of our civic leaders so do you find a lot of the students from high school these eighteen year olds there and listening into different services they're doing there for years and then they're going to college after that well they're coming out and what we want to do is come to the warrior scott a project first so that they learn about you know the higher education landscape and what all of that entails and then we encourage since most folks you know our program is in the summer because that's when the classrooms are empty and available on the dorms are empty so we're only a summer program but they can come through that generally speaking by now the application deadlines asked so we encourage our folks to take what we've taught them go to community college for a year where the cost is less many times folks can bear that cost out of pocket because they're you know the commuter schools save those precious g i bill funds for a top t er school where the price of tuition is much much more than if you're community college and so that's the process or that's the the road that we try you know to put our focus on and we found it's very very successful of off to junior college they'll go to community college i'll hit they'll start hitting home runs academically and now they're a much stronger candidate when they apply to those top tier schools and they're good man and they're getting in it's a significant numbers so these projects three month projects where  they're they're studying only for three months or is this a full college experience that's a good question there are there a short boot camp so we have a one week version and a two week version our one week version in the liberal arts and so we teach analytic reading and college level writing in conjunction with the professors from the university we have a standard program that we move from campus to campus our two week version has a second week tacked on and that's what we call our stem component seventy four percent of our enlisted folks as they're transitioning out and they're filling out the paper or i want to go to college that's my transition  the white house probably two thousand and thirteen the white house council on science and technology produced a paper that projected that with the changes in the job market america was going to need a million stem majors undergraduate stem majors by the year two thousand and twenty two well we're about halfway there we're far below the five hundred thousand that the economy needs so we're going to try to do our part going forward and to continue to grow our stem an initiative get that stem partnership with more schools and get more of our soldiers sailors airmen and marines not who are who are interested in stem but then showing them that they can do that because when it comes to the hard sciences a lot of our a lot of students in general have what the what's called a posture syndrome where they just they just look at something and they go that this is too hard i don't think i can do this the reality of it is that they can they just have to take kind of a different approach and a different mindset and we have a lot of success there today really looking forward to growing our stem initiative to more and more campuses so now how do you how do you go about finding these these students that are in the military and talking to them about the warriors call a project several different ways we have partnerships with a lot of the big military bases we've got a great working relationship with louis mccord we've got an awesome working relationship with camp pendleton california we get a lot of marines of fort drum up in upstate new york has a great partnership and we you know i have had several meetings with the folks over at the pentagon and the idea is when we just make you know on the active duty military side we present this information it's been passed on to the active duty soldier and sailor that has already made the decision to transition out and honestly anthony that's the perfect scenario we get somebody who's still on active duty who's about a year out of transition but as art made the decision to leave the military they come to the warrior scholar project eithe take leave for vacation time to do it or in many many cases they're getting what's called permissive t d y orders in other words they are given orders but they're not cost orders so that you know the individual has to foot the bill but they're not charged vacation time for it last summer sixty five percent of our student participants were actually still on active duty this is good because like i said a big part of what we're trying to do is make each one of our warrior scholars a better informed consumer of higher education so they understand what the higher education landscape looks like and then there's just when they do transition now they've got a full g i bill and that had started getting whittle away and then you know they can follow our you know kind of our recommendations go to community college build up a lot of these skills and then transition to to a top tier school and that's that's a real success story for us when that happens now do you also find these students to actually go to a four year college after this program in some things in some cases you know they do they do in some cases they go to a junior college the important data point is that forty two percent of our alumni we've been around now for you know six summers if you include the pilot year forty two  percent you know a little bit last than the one thousand alumni forty two percent of those that are attending a four year school are doing so a u s news and world report top twenty schools so we've got a lot of folks at columbia we've got folks at harvard we've got folks it at notre dame at stanford yale georgetown and we're very very proud of that and they're in there they're getting into these top tier schools and they're doing really well and like i said sixty five percent of all enlisted veterans were first generation college students so that's that's a significant when it's fantastic so so if i'm a high school student what's the recommendation you give a high school  student what's the path that that student would have to take are you talking about somebody just coming out of high school or yeah well it's just coming out of high school well you know it depends on you know what you're wanting as a high school student if you're a little bit  sure personally you know a twenty year navy veteran that i am i would recommend going into the service because i think it does especially for you for our young man it does amazing things you know maturity responsibility i mean people are absolutely transformed from kids in the man coming out of that four years later if you decide to transition out of the service now you have a much better grip on what life requires on the kind of hard work that you're going to have to put and and some of the opportunities that are made available to you through your military service and one of them you know is is that that all important g i bill with me be incredible benefit and the opportunities that that thing opens up you know for each one of our our listed service members now do you is there a is there a lot of networking that goes on with this as well the students trying to meet other people in different fields so they have something that they can go to you mean beforehand or you know before and after so they have a much better understanding of the importance of networking after the warrior scholar project there's there's a huge difference between the culture of the military and the culture of the civilian world generally speaking in the military you don't use the word i there is no i in team it's all about you know you know our folks my soldiers my sailors you know i take criticism i pass down you know praise and recognition in the civilian world it's a little bit ott you know a little bit different than that you have to be able to advocate for yourself you have to have an understanding what you want and networking is a very important part of that and so we teach and expose you know we have a reception at you know at the end of each course where these individuals can practice you know some of the social skills that we've expose them to and they can start their you know building their networking skills because it's important not only in college but it's also critically important you know later on especially if you land an internship with a great company you know you're you're looking at trying to build scholar prod project have you seen any kind of challenges that have come up of course you know a lot of you know in the military your so taking care of you know and you know you did that the routine is  very solid and it's very predictable and while you know you do have to you know grab your bags and deploy there's a standard military routine for everything you're taught i mean you're told where to be what time to be there what uniform to to wear and what time we're going to you know have chel you get into the civilian world so in the military it's kind of a top down sort of you know you know command and control  and and in the in the civilian world especially on a college campus it's more of a bottom up you have to know what assets are out there what's available to you as a student and then you've got to know how to go ask for that kind of help constantly having stuff shoved down at you as a civilian you've got to go looking for it and you've got to be able to ask for help asking for help is another challenge for a lot of our you know our military people because it inno in the military just press ahead you just push through it in the civilian world you've got to learn you know to ask for help and assistance and you don't know where to ask for that help in the system so it's kind of a mental shift and that's a big part of what we do you know in the evenings we have these discussions sessions where we have a little little funny little titles form like the d greening session you know the challenges session we have financial management you know because once again you know now everything's up to the individual and for a lot of these folks it's first time in their life they've ever had that kind of responsibility so pushing through is not recommended you know you go seek help if college level that's great and so what i some of the passions that that these military people have when they when they go to school the see a particular field that they like interesting only enough you know a lot of them want to major in stem and we're just getting that thing going and that our stem students are incredibly enthusiastic you know about the program but in a lot of cases we expose them aren't liberal arts and humanities side we expose them to you know citizenship and democracy and that that lights a fire in a lot of folks to major in fields like political science and then they you know they take these in turn ships at places like i mentioned the washington center or hill vets or some of the other you know things around the beltway you know that are available you know to you know to students and to military veterans so each each military person gets a certain amount from the v a to go  toward school right of post nine eleven g i bill you know is a benefit that you can it's basically you know it's like about your you know you get enrolled in the school the school understands that you you know you got g i bill benefits you know there's paperwork that's involved most of your top colleges have somebody who understands how that works and then the v a pays the school you know for tuition books fees and then each one of the you know the students gets a living stipend and that living stipend can vary based on what part of the country you know they're living in so if you're going to school at columbia living stipend is going to be considerably higher than if you're going to you know school in state of oklahoma county so we're coming to the end of our show and i usually ask my guests what advice do you want to give to the military folks that are out there that want to join  the warrior scholar program what do you want to what do you want to tell them well first of all have a real solid plan as to what you want out of education and have a goal and then apply you know we've got rolling applications it's w w w dot warrior dash scholar and we're collecting applications for twenty eight thousand now seats fill up pretty fast so you know get your get your application in but the biggest piece of advice is understand what you want understand that that's attainable and be very very tenacious and turman because you're capable of much much much more than you realize academically very well thank you very much for coming on the show well thanks for having me anthony i really really appreciate it sir no problem so you've been watching the secrets of college planning