Straddling Two Communities
SOC helps colleges and universities to understand
the military student and the military community
understand the higher education community.
Dr. Kathryn M. Snead
Dr. Snead was interviewed by MAE editorial coordinator Diana McGonigle.
Q: Can you tell us a little about the history of SOC?
A: SOC as an organization was created about 35 years ago. If you look at the early and mid seventies when it was created, one of the concerns at that point was that we had a number of military servicemembers leaving the armed services and coming back during the Vietnam War era. A chief concern to the nation was how do we help them transition to the higher education community? How do we make them welcome, and what are some of the concerns or issues unique to that population? SOC was created around that basic tenet—and what the organization has done is to try to help both colleges and universities understand the military student, and vice versa, to help the military community better understand the higher education community—what the requirements are, what the needs are, from both perspectives.
To a great extent, we’re the liaison—I often describe our organizational position as one where we’re straddling both communities—the military community and the higher education organizations. We’ve been around for 35 years, and while some of the issues that were concerns in the early seventies have been resolved, we’ve seen other issues and transitions come to the forefront. And some of the transition issues and concerns for military students never go away. What we are trying to do as an organization is to help facilitate—not just the course taking of servicemembers but actually degree completion for both servicemembers and their family members.
Q: You mentioned some of the problems that you are dealing with over time. What challenges are facing SOC today?
A: I think SOC, like all sectors of the public and community, are experiencing a profusion of information sources, multiple and different kinds of information. You can go to the Internet and search on a specific educational program or degree and be presented with a lot of choices. Each one promoting their programs, services and degrees as the key to your future. For the servicemember (and for SOC) the issue is being able to distinguish between reliable and accredited educational programs and those established to sell you a bill of goods. Perhaps it’s a diploma mill or someone wanting to take their money and not give them a worthwhile education, knowledge and skill acquisition worthy of their time and money. So that’s the challenge we have: how do we deal with what I could call “aggressive” marketing, maybe institutional admissions and marketing practices taking advantage of some members of the military population not necessarily savvy about higher education. It’s not just SOC’s challenge, it’s also the challenge of the military voluntary education service chiefs, as to how we provide enough information and accurate information for servicemembers to make the right choices as far as a college or university enrollment.
Q: What’s new at SOC?
A: What I would describe as new is the Military Students’ Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was approved in October by our advisory board. They are really guidelines and educational rights of students so that they know they have the right to ask questions, the right to printed information about colleges and universities—a variety of items like that. Basically good practices or standards of good practices. What we have done with the Military Students’ Bill of Rights is to make a poster, and those are provided to all the SOC member institutions and also provided to all of the military installations in the world. We will make those available—our goal is to have them prominently posted in classrooms and education centers on military bases, so as students are sitting in class they have that information available. We’re sending it to colleges and universities in hopes that they may adopt it on their Web pages and again let students know that they do have rights to ask questions, get answer to potential students’ tough questions.
Q: What do you think are the attributes of a “military-friendly” school?
A: There are probably three or four institutional attributes that help define a military friendly school from my perspective. I think the number one attribute is flexibility in terms of policies, procedures and practices—that institutions take a look at the military population, recognize that mobile military students have very unique needs and work to incorporate flexibility in their educational policies and practices to accommodate those special needs. Another key attribute is the recognition and award of college credit for military training. Our servicemembers receive training in the military that has been evaluated by the American Council on Education and many training experiences carry college-level credit recommendations. Military friendly institutions should recognize and award college credit for military experiences where it is appropriate in degree requirements. Certainly, in terms of deployment and mobilization, students need the flexibility to withdraw if they need to without negative impact on their grade point average or their future records. We find that many of the institutions, once the situation is explained about the military withdrawals, they are willing to do that. Because the military student is a mobile student, he/she needs flexibility and recognition of other sources of academic credit. Whether it be testing for credit where they can prove or demonstrate that they have acquired the necessary knowledge and skills, there may be transferability from other colleges and universities to be able to use credit that they have received in a previous assignment and apply it toward degree completion.
Q: How are problems with basic academic skills being addressed in SOC schools or the military?
A: They are actually taken care of both places. The military provides basic skills programs to help servicemembers in reading, writing, and math proficiency. While they primarily provide those the needed instruction in improve the competencies on the job, they apply also to lifelong learning, and so, they offer basic skills programs so servicemembers can take advantage of them during their duty schedule. Many of those are allowed to take classes—self improvement, remedial, basic skills classes—during duty time so it’s not over and above their already long work day.
From the college and university perspective, there are remedial courses and tutorial classes that are available if a student gets to college and needs additional help. There are usually skill laboratories and tutorial staff to help as well as credited and non-credited classes. Most of the colleges across the country typically provide placement exams to ensure that students are placed in the right level course. That can be one of the other measures that will help them assess their current skill levels and realize that they don’t have all the required skills to successfully complete a course, for example English Composition I, and they may be able to brush up on some of the skills through refresher preparation. It may even be that they are like me and haven’t studied math in 20 years; the challenge of taking an algebra test and successfully passing it would be an overwhelming obstacle—the good news is there’s remedial work offered at most institutions that can improve our math skills and get us ready for algebra.
Q: What are the similarities among the different SOC programs [SOCAD, SOCNAV, etc.]? What are the differences? Why isn’t there just one program for all of the services?
A: Within the broad SOC Consortium, there are about 1,700 member colleges and universities. When SOC was created, the consortium was the only organization or entity created. But about 10 years after SOC was created, the degree network systems came into existence. The Army degree was the first program established. It was established based on the needs of the Army Continuing Education System [ACES]. It was developed for the mobile military Army Soldier. ACES leaders felt soldiers needed something more than just reasonable transferability policies colleges and universities to help them complete their college degrees—they asked SOC to establish guaranteed transferability articulations among the participating colleges. The degree network system is comprised of a smaller set of colleges and universities that you might find geographically located on or near a military base. These colleges and universities provide educational programs and courses identified by the military services as being needed or of interest to military populations. And thus, the Degree Network Systems have been created for four of the military services (Army, Navy, Marine Corp, and Coast Guard). While the structure of the degree network system is the same for SOCAD, SOCNAV, SOCMAR, and SOCGuard, the list of participating colleges, locations and degree programs vary by military service need.
One of the key features of the degree network system is that SOC has established course articulations in key subject areas such as: criminal justice, business, accounting, psychology. We work closely with the academic administrators at the accredited colleges/universities to develop guaranteed transferability among participating schools supporting various military locations. For a Marine who is, assigned at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and then moves to Camp Pendleton on the West Coast, we’ve created an articulation system between the schools so military [students] don’t start over when they go to a new institution. They continue to work with one college, their home institution, where they will ultimately receive their degree. That home college will let them take courses with other colleges and universities. The degree network system helps the student in that we’ve already created a guaranteed transferability in advance. They don’t have to negotiate that for themselves from one college to the next. The SOC Degree Network System Handbooks contain the course transferability tables, participating colleges, and related program information. The handbook’s available on our Website. You can download it; we also have it available by CD-ROM. So an education counselor can sit down with a military student and identify “This is the course that’s guaranteed to satisfy a requirement at your home college.” Whether you are overseas, in the continental U.S., or whether you’re on the other side of the world, there’s a distance learning course that may be able to satisfy a college requirement you need for graduation.
The guaranteed transferability feature applies to the core members of the Degree Network System. We also have affiliate members who offer unique and very specialized degree programs that are important to the military but where course transferability is difficult or impossible to establish. Many of the degree programs provided by affiliate members are closely related to a military occupational specialty and the colleges are granted substantial amounts of credit in a student’s major for their military experiences.
How those programs differ is primarily by participating colleges. There are some colleges that are not geographically located or don’t provide degree programs that all the services need. So they may just participate with one unique service, say, the Coast Guard or the Navy. They’re not located where they would be helpful for the Army to participate. As well, they may differ by subject area. When we looked at the educational needs of the Navy, they have need for nuclear engineering technology, where none of the other services may have that area of concern. Similarly, with the Coast Guard, they may be interested in maritime law enforcement, and it’s not as much a concern because of the mission of the other services.
There are some unique variations that, at first glance, you may not see between the Army and the Marine Corps, or the Navy and the Army. We try to focus on those degree programs and what’s needed by the services. We work closely with the service chief of each of the four services. They tell us what their educational needs are for their soldiers, sailors, airmen or Coast Guard members, and we try to match them with the colleges and universities that have those programs.
In addition to the SOC degree network system within the broader SOC Consortium, we also have outreach programs for select services. There’s ConAP, the Concurrent Admissions Program, and that was established based on the needs of the army recruiting commands. There’s SOCGuard, which is an outreach program for the Army National Guard that we can help them promote educational opportunities for the Guard member.
Q: How does a college or university getinto the SOC Consortium?
A: Primarily they make an application, and that application is on our Website. The principles and criteria for membership are also posted. Essentially when a college makes an application for membership they agree to abide by those policies, institutional guidelines and agree to be military friendly. They submit the application; we have a membership coordinator who makes sure the information provided is accurate, accreditation is verified, and all required information is provided. If they meet those standards they are admitted. There’s not a membership fee other than a commitment to meet all stated principles and criterion, and follow the established operating guidelines.
Q: What do you think about the growth of distance education?
A: The higher education community across the country certainly has seen the growth in students taking distance learning courses. I think one of the reasons we see that increase with military students is that the high operations tempo is such that it’s probably the only way they can continue to make progress toward a degree. Certainly if they’re deployed or they’re mobilized to an area outside their geographical community. So for the military student it’s a great way to continue making progress toward the degree.
Having said that, I also recognize that online learning isn’t for everyone. Certainly for sailors and the Coast Guard personnel connectivity is often times an issue. They are located in parts of the world, under the sea where they don’t have access to Internet capability. So they can’t take an online course. We encourage what we call “blended” learning for students and colleges to have multiple formats for their courses. Some people do better in a face-to-face or a classroom situation. Others can handle CD-ROM, video courses, “books in a bag,” a variety of other mediums. What we encourage is that people look at all of those. Someone who’s on active duty might take a few distance learning courses while they’re deployed, when they’re back to a military installation, they’re in a classroom. If it’s a certain type of course like statistics, better than going online, it’s better to be in a classroom or in a tutorial situation.
Q: What does the future hold for SOC?
A: I’d have to say I’m optimistic about our future. As I mentioned before, we’ve been around 35 years. We’ve recently signed a five-year contract with the Department of Defense to continue our existence. So for us that’s a good thing, and as we go forward we’re looking at a number of other issues that will keep it interesting for us and hopefully make a difference for servicemembers. One of the things we’ll be working on in the next three to six months is a national campus survey for servicemember and veterans’ services, to really find out what kinds of programs and services are out there at colleges and universities. To identify what they are, to try to identify the needs of veterans and returning students and be able to help them make better choices. As we see servicemembers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq, they have an interest in higher education, and much like in the Vietnam War era, trying to help them transition smoothly and enroll in classes on campuses across the country.
Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges Consortium
Military Students’ Bill of Rights
All military student populations have basic rights to satisfactory college marketing, admissions, and student services practices including the right to:
• Accurate information about a school’s programs, requirements, accreditation, and its potential impact on course transferability.
• Access basic college/university information and fees without disclosure of student personal information.
• Educational planning and career guidance without high-pressure registration and enrollment efforts from institutions.
• A clear and complete explanation of course/program enrollment procedures and all resulting financial obligations.
• Explore, without coercion, all financial aid options before signing up for student loans or other financial assistance.
• Accurate scholarship information, free of misleading “scholarship” offers based on military tuition assistance.
• Appropriate academic screening and course placement based on student readiness.
• Appropriate, accessible academic and student support services.
• Clearly defined institutional “drop/add” and withdrawal policies and procedures including information about the impact of military duties (e.g., mobilization, activation, temporary duty assignments) on their academic standing and financial responsibilities.
• Clearly defined grievance/appeals processes.
Official Websites for information on Voluntary Education
Army Continuing Education System - https:/www.hrc.army.mil/site/education/
Army National Guard Education Support Center - http://www.virtualarmory.com/education/
Air Force Voluntary Education - https://afvec.langley.af.mil/
Coast Guard Voluntary Education - https://www.uscg.mil/hq/cgi/
Marine Corps Lifelong Learning - https://www.usmc-mccs.org/education/
Navy College Program - https://www.navycollege.navy.mil/
U.S. Reserve Forces - https://www.voled.doded.mil/voled_web/serevices/rcvoled/rcvoledindex.htm
For more information on Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges and a complete list of SOC Consortium institutions, go to www.soc.aascu.org.