Dartmouth College President Helps Wounded Vets Get In College
QuestionGirl May 23rd, 2007 - 9:59 amA nice story…….
When he first met James Wright, the president of Dartmouth College, two years ago, Samuel Crist was in a hospital bed at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, recuperating from gunshot wounds from a firefight in Falluja, Iraq.
“I was pretty heavily medicated, so my memory is a little bit foggy, but he was visiting people and asking about their experiences in the war and pushing people to get an education,” said Crist, 22, who grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana. “He said he’d been a marine, too, and he’d gone to college after he got out as a lance corporal, the same rank I separated at.”
That hospital visit changed things for both Crist and Wright: On Wright’s advice, Crist enrolled in college courses in Texas, and next autumn he will transfer to Dartmouth.
Wright, 67, meanwhile, has made eight more visits to wounded veterans at Bethesda and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and, with the American Council on Education, started a program to provide individualized college counseling to seriously injured veterans.
Because of advances in medical care, and the speed with which those wounded on the battlefield are treated, the survival rate for service members with serious injuries is far higher in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts than in previous wars. These circumstances have created a pool of young men and women who must remake their lives with brain injuries, amputations and other significant limitations.
Injured or not, veterans get extensive educational benefits. But while service members on active duty have access to many educational counseling programs, such access is harder for those who have left active duty and face long recuperation, especially if they are from families where college is not a given.
More at the International Herald Tribune
