Green Zone Training – Aligning Faculty and Staff Perceptions of Student Veterans

Green Zone Training (GZT) is a common name for a higher education inclusion program to help staff, faculty, and students with familiarity and understanding of the military experience. Those who complete Green Zone Training are not expected to be experts in the military or in resolving Student Veterans transition challenges. In an effort to help faculty and staff close their knowledge gap of Student Veterans, over 100 universities across the nation provide GZT. Green Zone Training graduates are identified as advocates for Student Veterans and can direct them to appropriate resources. Student Veterans are a part of the campus population, and given the tools to excel, they can do just as well if not better than their civilian peers. Faculty, staff, and students are part of the campus support environment and play an important role to help Student Veterans and active duty members who face similar, and often times, different challenges than traditional students. Student Veterans confront many misperceptions and stereotypes from faculty, staff, fellow students, often exacerbated by media. Some perceptions may paint the Student Veterans positively, while some perceptions over-simplify them negatively. This paper is part of a larger study of faculty and staff (mis)perceptions towards Student Veterans and various factors that can neutralize these misperceptions. Using a counter balanced, quantitative survey instrument across several institutions (TABLE 1), GZT was found to have a neutralizing effect on some of the perceptions, but also found to statistically reinforce others. The survey questions compare the agreement or disagreement of several known Veteran stereotypes. The focus of the paper will be on the biases of engineering faculty and staff based on whether or not they had Green Zone Training. These remaining and reinforced misperceptions highlight opportunities to improve institution-specific Green Zone Training for staff and faculty and possible improvement of institutional policies.