Student Veterans’ Strengths: Exploring Student Veterans’ Perceptions of Their Strengths and How to Harness Them in Higher Education

Abstract This project explores student veterans’ perceptions of the strengths they bring to a university and how those strengths affect their academic performances. We employed mixed methods by conducting an online survey and interviews with 115 student veterans in a large southwestern public university. Findings reveal that student veterans perceive that they have strengths in communication, diversity management, leadership, and drive and that these strengths positively affect self-efficacy and motivation in their academic performances. Further, a key finding and contribution to the literature on student veteran strengths is that student veterans contextualize communication in order to translate strengths gleaned from the military into an academic setting in service of self, peers, and faculty. Based on these findings, we advocate for ways higher education institutions and faculty can support student veterans’ strengths.