For military learners, earning a degree or credential is an important milestone. But it is far from the end of the journey.
A 2026 RAND report, How Colleges Can Support Student Veterans in Campus-to-Career Transitions, reminds us that we should think more broadly about what student success really means. Access matters. Persistence and completion matter. But so does what comes next.
Can military learners translate their education, training, and experience into meaningful civilian careers that provide a livable wage, economic opportunities, and long-term financial stability for them and their families?
That’s the real end game.
And it is an important distinction. It also reflects how we think about our work at Dixon Center for Military and Veterans Services (CMVS). Supporting military learners from service to education and training to employment requires more than any single program, institution, or intervention. It requires us to serve, engage, and advocate.
Serving
Military learners are not a single, uniformly defined population, and neither is the path they take after their military service.
Some pursue traditional degrees. Others, increasingly, may choose certificates, apprenticeships, industry credentials, work-based learning, or other alternative pathways. And many will move between education, training, and employment several times over the course of their careers. The question isn’t whether one pathway is better than another. It is whether military learners have the information they need to choose the pathway that is right for them.
RAND points to the value of greater comprehensive career guidance that includes information about occupations, earnings, workplace environments, and available pathways. Our alternative pathways research explores how awareness and access influence the education and training choices available to military learners.
Bottom line: you cannot choose a pathway you do not know exists. And knowing that a pathway exists is not the same as knowing whether it will take you where you want to go. That is what informed choice really means.
Engaging
Selecting a pathway is only part of the equation. Military learners also need to be able to persist once they get there.
And oftentimes, the barriers have very little to do with academics.
Through Operation Veteran Empowerment (OVE), CMVS has worked with partner institutions to learn how financial pressures—including housing, food, transportation, delayed benefits, and the everyday costs of staying enrolled—can disrupt education.
Those lessons led CMVS to launch the Veterans Persistence Bridge (VPB).
This pilot with Columbia University, Fordham University, and The New School provides targeted bridge grants to eligible military-affiliated women at the beginning of the academic term when benefit delays and other expenses can create additional pressure and potentially disrupt academic pursuit.
The grants matter. But what we learn matters, too.
By examining persistence outcomes and hearing directly from military learners and our institutional partners, we can learn how timely, targeted support can help students remain enrolled and where additional barriers may still exist.
That is also why engagement matters.
Colleges and universities, workforce organizations, employers, researchers, veteran-serving organizations, community partners, and military transition programs all hold different pieces of the puzzle. Bringing those partners together helps us better understand where military learners encounter barriers and, more importantly, what we can do to address them.
Advocating
Evidence lets us move from identifying challenges to improving our response.
RAND calls for additional student veteran surveys and focus groups, evaluation of interventions, comparisons of veteran and nonveteran outcomes, and testing of career-awareness and work-based-learning models. Those recommendations align closely with work underway at CMVS.
Our Alternative Pathways research is helping us better understand awareness, access, and decision-making around education and training options. OVE and VPB are helping us examine financial barriers and persistence. The Dixon Center Research Collaborative brings researchers, institutions, and partners together to ask questions, examine evidence, and put what we learn into practice.
That matters because advocating for military learners isn’t simply about identifying what isn’t working. It is about bringing data and experience into conversations about policies, programs, and practices—and ensuring that military learners and those who serve them are part of those conversations.
And So Much More
One thing we know is that the path from military service to a meaningful civilian career rarely follows a straight line. RAND’s report sums it up well.
A military learner may pursue a degree, earn a credential, enter the workforce, return for additional education or training, change careers, or, like many adult learners, do all of those things at different points in life.
Success, then, cannot be measured by access alone. Or completion alone. Or even employment alone. It has to be measured across the full continuum.
The RAND report reinforces the need to look at the big picture: Do military learners understand the choices available to them? Can they access the education or training that is right for them? Do they have the support they need to persist? And, ultimately, does that education or training lead to meaningful opportunity and greater financial stability for them and their families?
Because earning the degree or credential matters.
What it allows a military learner to do next matters just as much.
That is where the real work continues. As the pathways between education, training, and employment evolve, so must the ways we serve, engage, and advocate.
Source: RAND, How Colleges Can Support Student Veterans in Campus-to-Career Transitions: Summary of a 2026 RAND Workshop (2026).
