08/25/2026
Fall semester at Owens began yesterday. This week is when a specific kind of
attrition happens, and it's mostly invisible.
It isn't students dropping out. It's prospective students who watched a start date
pass, concluded the window closed, and quietly deferred. In our experience that
deferral is rarely one semester. A veteran who sits out fall often sits out spring,
and the gap compounds until returning to school stops being a plan and becomes a
thing they used to consider.
Two things are worth saying to those veterans right now. First, Veterans Upward
Bound operates outside the academic calendar entirely. Academic refresher work in
math, reading, and writing, FAFSA assistance, GI Bill navigation, and military
transcript evaluation are available at any point in the year, at no cost, for
veterans headed to any accredited institution. Second, most institutions in this
region offer sections with later start dates within the same term, so the semester
itself is frequently more open than it appears from outside.
If you work with veterans in Northwest Ohio or Southeast Michigan, the next two
weeks are a high-leverage moment to make that point to someone who thinks they
missed their shot.
https://lwkhgc.short.gy/VetTRIO
Funded by the U.S. Department of Education
