Matt Butler, a retired Marine and executive director of the University’s Office of Military and Veterans’ Services, explains in this opinion piece how Fordham is stepping up.
When I retired from the Marine Corps and enrolled at Fordham University, I had the GI Bill, a mission-focused mindset, and more life experience than most classmates. I rechanneled my sense of purpose to support my fellow veterans and was fortunate to have the clarity and confidence to pursue it. That experience led me to join the university as a staff member, and today I serve as executive director of Fordham’s Office of Military and Veterans’ Services.
So you’d think that when my daughter enrolled at Fordham, we’d have everything figured out.
But even without using the GI Bill, figuring out how to navigate financial aid and connect her with the proper support took time, even for me, someone who leads the university’s veteran programs and works in this space every day.
That’s the quiet reality for thousands of military children and spouses in higher education. At Fordham, nearly half of our military-connected students are dependents. To better understand their experiences, we embarked on an in-depth assessment of this often hidden population.
We partnered with Virtual Veterans Communities to conduct one of the most comprehensive evaluations of Fordham’s military-connected students. The findings confirmed what many of us have long sensed: military dependents experience college differently than veterans or traditional students.
We love to say, “military families serve too.” We acknowledge their sacrifices during deployments. We post tributes on social media during the Month of the Military Child. But when it comes time to help a spouse complete a degree or a child navigate VA benefits, they often face those challenges without a clear roadmap.
Over the past decade, many colleges have made significant strides in establishing support systems for student veterans, including dedicated benefits counselors, veteran centers, and transition programs. Yet those systems, built with veterans in mind, may not fully meet the different needs of dependents. That leaves a tremendous opportunity to design better pathways, resources, and communities for those whose service stories are no less real, just less visible. Institutions must expand their lens to uphold the “military-friendly” label.
At Fordham, we’re working to do precisely that. Next year, we’ll open a new Veterans and Military Family Center at our Rose Hill campus — intentionally designed with dependents in mind. The space will be visible, welcoming, and shaped by the lived experiences of students raised in military life.
If we genuinely believe military families serve, too, we must build a higher education system that serves them in return.
