In an effort to better understand the skills that student-veterans bring with them to college, a group of New Jersey educators attended a week-long Marine Corps Educators Boot Camp at Paris Island, South Carolina. Many of the participants of the program were high school guidance counselors, principals, and history teachers who took part in order to learn more about what some of their students may be doing following graduation; other participants were administrators at community colleges who wanted to find out more about education in the military and how the skills that veterans have learned there can translate into college credit and help them find work in the civilian workforce.

Each year, the Major George A. Smith Memorial Fund awards the HOOAH Award to a veteran who “defines citizenship through service to our country, both in uniform and beyond.” Past honorees include Eric Greitens, Derek Blumke, Eric Hilleman, and Chris Marvin; read their inspiring stories here. Nominations for the 2013 HOOAH Award are now being accepted.

At the New York Times “At War” blog, James Dao takes a look at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s “Hiring Our Heroes” effort to help military veterans find jobs in the civilian world.  As Dao recounts, Kevin Schmiegel, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and executive director of Hiring Our Heroes, organized a team last year to create a “Personal Branding Resume Engine,” a website that helps veterans translate their military experience into jobs that civilian employers can understand. Unveiled this week at a job fair at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan, the resume engine was developed with the help from Fortune 500 human resources managers.

“You know the expression ‘never leave the fallen behind’? Homelessness is the equivalent of leaving a buddy on the battlefield. They’re heroes in the shadows.” So says Joe Leal, founder of the Vet Hunters Project, a group whose mission is to track down and help homeless comrades. Leal is an Iraq-war veteran and a reservist  with the 115th Combat Service Support Battalion in South El Monte, a city outside Los Angeles, California.

As we’ve noted before, more universities and colleges are working to help military veterans adjust to college life. Even so, there is a long way to go, as Ryan Gallucci recently reminded readers of the New York Times’ “At War” blog. Gallucci, who is the deputy legislative director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, provides a good overview of services currently available to student veterans and suggests some ideas for improvements.

We’ve noted before the paucity of data available tracking how veterans perform once they enter college. Now, at the New York Times, James Dao writes about why that data is important in helping veterans face their unique challenges as students of higher education.

The New York Times reports this morning that Wal-Mart will announce a plan later today that will provide a job for nearly every veteran who wants one. The program, which will focus on veterans that have left the military in the previous year and did not receive a dishonorable discharge, will last for five years and will, according to the company, lead to the hiring of more than 100,000 veterans.

We reported in December that, even though veterans are now enrolling in colleges and other higher education programs at rates last seen right after World War II, there exists very little information on how veterans are doing once they matriculate. Roughly 70 percent of higher education institutions do not collect retention and graduation rates for undergraduate veterans. Writing earlier this week in Inside Higher Ed, Paul Fain provides an update, noting that a new agreement between the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Student Clearinghouse will help provide better data on how veterans perform in college.

Writing for the New York Times “At War” blog, James Dao takes a look at a new program in New York City that helps veterans and their families navigate the complex web of federal assistance programs. The Single Stop Veterans Initiative is an off-shoot of Single Stop USA, which has provided counseling to the city’s poor for more than a decade.

At the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) website, Alice Murphy interviews Eric Greitens, author of the recently-released book The Warrior’s Heart: Becoming a Man of Compassion and Courage. The book is an adaptation of Greiten’s previous book, The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL, but is aimed specifically at younger readers in an attempt to equip them with the drive and resources to begin a life of volunteering and civic engagement even now as teens and young adults.

With soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to a down economy, many veterans are choosing to enroll in colleges and other higher education programs. Indeed, the recent increase of student veterans in higher education has been the fastest since the GIs of World War II flooded college campuses in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Now, as they did then, colleges are scrambling to understand student veterans and help them succeed.

Writing for the Courier-Journal, Staff Sgt. Salvatore Guinta, the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor since the Vietnam War, worries that even with the public outpouring of support for service members, the care packages sent, and the warm homecomings offered, “today’s military members serve a nation more disconnected from its armed forces that at any time in our country’s history.”

Last week, Susan Davis at USA Today reported on the decreasing number of military veterans serving in the Congress, noting that “when the next session convenes in January, the two chambers will have the fewest number of veterans serving since World War II.”

Here’s an end-of-the-week news roundup for things happening in the citizenship world you may have missed:

• CIRCLE has compiled some great reports examining youth voting behavior in the presidential election.
• Writing for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, Bridget Draxler, a professor at Monmouth College, highlights a new civic engagement program at St. Olaf College.
• Rebekah Sanderlin, an Army wife, writes in the New York Times “At War” blog about the challenges that military families face.
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This Sunday, November 11, is Veterans Day. We as a nation commemorate the holiday every year on November 11, but how many of us know why we do? What makes Veterans Day different from Memorial Day? What does the holiday mean, and how do we properly observe it? What does it mean to honor the Veterans in our midst?

As the Washington Post reported this week, the number of college students across the country participating in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps has increased by 50 percent since the 2005–06 school year, with 36,474 students enrolled in the program this past school year. Indeed, during the 2011–12 school year, “the Army commissioned 5,880 officers and reservists, surpassing its goal of 5,350. That number is expected to increase in coming years as large incoming classes mature.”

Every year, students in Tom Clarke’s high school history class at Lake Central High School in St. John, Indiana, embark upon a research project to track down the families of the state’s battle casualties and learn more about those who died in service to their country. And for each of the 27 years that the project has been assigned, both students and the families they interact with come away moved by the experience.

Over at the “At War” blog of The New York Times, Jonathan Raab, a sergeant in the New York National Guard currently serving in Kuwait, reminds us of the hardships many veterans face when they return home from war–and the responsibility we have to engage them in thoughtful conversation about their concerns.

As we noted last week, Brown University, which is currently the only Ivy League institution that has yet to allow ROTC to return to its campus, is attempting to provide support to students who have served or are interested in serving in the military–without actually welcoming the return of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program to campus. Writing in response to the campus administration’s position, the editorial board at The Brown Daily Herald has called for a reinstatement of the ROTC program on campus.

In April of 2005, while serving as an infantry officer, Army Captain Scott Smiley was injured when a car bomb exploded while he was patrolling the city of Mosul, Iraq. The blast left him temporarily paralyzed on his right side and permanently blind.