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HigherEdJobs podcast host Andy Hibel and guest co-host Monika Sziron recently spoke with LeNaya Hezel, chief programs officer at the Warrior-Scholar Project, about her career path as a military spouse and her work and research in higher education.
Sziron, assistant director of editorial strategy for HigherEdMilitary, asked Hezel to discuss why higher education is a great career option for veterans and the military-affiliated community.
She said universities and college campuses — whether they’re physical or virtual – are like miniature cities. “When you think about serving in the military and if you’re on a base or, connected to a base, it’s a mini city,” Hezel said.
On campus, objectives must be fulfilled similarly to those on a military base. People also have specialized roles at universities and in the military.
“You need people to manage the buildings,” she said. “You need people to be able to manage teams, you need people to be able to oversee facilities, things of that nature.”
In the military, a lot of teaching and training is involved in helping people learn a specialty or how to tackle their next job assignment. Hezel said that there are practices and pedagogy in that process as well.
Many people don’t realize that you can have a career in higher education even if you don’t aspire to be a professor or researcher. Hezel said that looking back to when she was in college, where she earned a degree in vocal performance, she was unaware that higher education was a career option.
“A lot of people think that about the military as well,” she said.
Hezel said it’s beneficial to have military-affiliated people working at universities because of their diverse experiences, leadership, and resiliency.
A Winding Road of a Career Path for a Military Spouse
In 2024, Hezel was nominated by her peers for the HigherEdMilitary Spotlight Award. Sziron said advisory council members base their nominations on those doing innovative work.
Hezel said it meant a lot to be recognized by council members.
“My career had a winding path,” she said, not unlike many veterans. Hezel said she now views this as a benefit rather than a burden since it’s helped her make better connections with student veterans.
As a trained opera singer, Hezel began performing in middle school, started singing nationally around eighth grade, and went to an arts high school. She enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied vocal performance. During her senior year, she met a guy who was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy.
They were stationed on the West Coast when the Post-9/11 GI Bill went into effect. By that time, Hezel said she knew she would become a military spouse. One constant in their lives — given regular moves across the country — was education.
After moving back to Washington, D.C., Hezel earned a master’s degree in higher education administration from George Washington University, focusing on military-affiliated students. At the time, around 2010, the university was one of a few private institutions in the U.S. that offered services for veterans beyond basic benefits, she said.
“I got to learn from the ground up; what does it look like to support this population at a private school beyond just certifying benefits?” Hezel said.
From the start, she saw that the students brought something to the table, not just financial benefits for the university but also in the classroom, based on their experience in the military.
Hezel subsequently oversaw the Veterans Office at Georgetown University and left in 2020 to pursue a doctoral degree. She recently successfully defended her dissertation and earned a Ph.D. in sociology from George Mason University.
Research on Veterans Offices, Centers May Ruffle Feathers
Her doctoral research examined how universities structure services and resources for military-connected students. Specific questions she explored include how the setup is structured, how students get information, and how they get information.
Hezel said conducting this research was fun.
“It’s an untapped student population in terms of what we know about them and how we best support them because they really didn’t get put on the radar until 2009 when the floodgates opened in terms of accessibility to higher education,” she said.
Hibel, also the chief operating officer and a co-founder of HigherEdJobs, asked Hezel to talk a bit more about her research. “What can university administrators do for graduate students or others who can benefit from support services?” he asked.
Hezel said though she had successfully defended in May, she waited a long time to publicly share her findings. “I knew it would ruffle some feathers a bit,” she said.
For a long time, having a Veterans Resource Center or a similar organization on campus has been deemed the gold standard, Hezel said. In her research, however, she found that there are different ways to support the military-affiliated student population.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a resource center,” she said.
More specifically, Hezel found that undergraduates use veterans’ centers to forge social connections and build camaraderie. She saw that students in VA work-study programs and those in groups like Student Veterans of America also consistently use these centers.
But for everyone else, it was either hit or miss, said Hezel.
The findings led her to explore why undergraduate students were the main users of these centers. They are most likely the newest to transition from the military into higher education, while graduate students are often at a different phase in their careers.
Hezel said graduate students are either already well-resourced or they find what they need within their degree programs.
“It’s not a physical resource or space that they need,” she said. “And that’s not to say that we need to have graduate students in the resource center. The fact that they’re getting [what they need] somewhere else is great.”
Hezel said the findings challenged what she knew and understood, having worked in this space for a long time. Now, she said that there are other ways for institutions to be successful in supporting this population.
It depends on who’s on your campus, and what resources are already available.
“We sometimes wrap our identities around [our] support for veterans and, therefore, if I’m supporting veterans this way and only this way, and if somebody critiques [me and says], ‘well, there’s another way that we can support them,’ then there can be some tension.”
In the end, Hezel said each university or college should ask: Are we supporting military-affiliated students and veterans in a way that makes sense for that campus?
There are other resources and services, and there might be external resources off-campus with which you can collaborate instead of reinventing the wheel.
Listen to the full episode below for the rest of the conversation.
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