BERKELEY — In this peace-loving city that tried out the Marines, the troops have arrived at the university.
Nearly 80 known veterans are among the 6,300 new undergraduates at UC Berkeley this semester. The number doesn't seem particularly high until one considers that the campus as a whole had only 151 known veterans among its 35,000 or so students last year.
The 77 veteran undergrads — mostly transfer students, with a handful of freshmen — are believed to represent the largest such group in the 10-campus University of California system, said Ron Williams, who coordinates veterans' services at the Berkeley campus.
As part of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's two-year-old Troops to College initiative, the university this year started paying more attention to veterans, Williams said, reaching out to applicants from community colleges and elsewhere. The outreach apparently worked, leading to a jump in the number of applicants who identified themselves as military veterans.
"They've been largely a hidden population on our campus," Williams said. "People have a lot of assumptions that they make about Berkeley. Folks would be more than a little reluctant to self-identify as a veteran."
Education and government leaders don't know for sure how many veterans attend California schools, but they estimate that there were at least 25,000 veteran undergraduates last year. The majority — more than 16,000 — were at Advertisementcommunity colleges.
At Berkeley, the renewed attention has helped veteran students bridge the gap between their service and the classroom. The school is offering an inaugural class on making that transition, an integral part of helping students who were dodging bullets just months earlier, said Jason Deitch, a UC Berkeley graduate student and former soldier who heads a student veterans' group.
"Becoming a soldier requires a full-scale conditioning," said Deitch, an ethics and social theory student who served in the first Persian Gulf war. "But there is no such process when you leave the military. When (soldiers) leave the service without something available, you get what you had with the Vietnam War."
Until this year, the federal GI Bill had undergone few substantive changes since it was adopted to help World War II veterans, many of whom gained college degrees with its help. But rising college prices and living costs had eroded the law's effectiveness, contributing to homelessness and other problems among Vietnam veterans in particular.
Lawmakers overhauled the legislation this year, and significantly more lucrative educational benefits are due to take effect in 2009. The new law means colleges and universities could see a flood of veterans next year.
Among the reforms are localized cost-of-living numbers that will help students in the expensive Bay Area, said Eric Heng, a student-affairs analyst for the UC system. Relatively meager payments may have hurt enrollment in the past, he said.
"With the new GI Bill, they're not going to have to be quite so strapped for cash," he said. "I think knowing that the money wasn't there from the government kept a lot of veterans from enrolling."
Schwarzenegger's push for more veteran students was driven primarily by the 23-campus California State University, which in turn was pushed by one of its own. Retired Marine Bucky Peterson was a vice president at Sonoma State in 2006 when he noticed a lack of fellow veterans on campus.
"I was interested in the veterans on campus to see if I could help them," said Peterson, chairman of the statewide Troops to College committee. "There was only a handful at that point."
He brought his concerns to Cal State Chancellor Charles Reed, who Peterson said was aware of the issue.
"Two weeks later, we were with the governor," Peterson said, "and the governor said, 'We're going to do this.'"
More schools are appointing counselors to help veterans with transitions and financial aid, said J.P. Tremblay, a deputy secretary with the California Department of Veterans Affairs. The value of those specialists should not be overlooked, he said.
"Two months ago, (the student) may have been patrolling the streets of Baghdad or Basra," Tremblay said. "It's nice to have someone you can talk to who understands your experiences."
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