Students who have completed upper-level military experience can now earn up to 12 hours of free elective credit, thanks to the approval of an addendum to the Articulation of Military Credit.
The bill estimates that there are 700 military-affiliated students at NC State, including about 200 on reserve and about 280 veterans who could benefit from this addendum should they return to college after serving in the military.
Haley Scott, a senior studying political science, initiated the addendum. She took a year off after her freshman year to go through basic training and intelligence school with the Navy. She said she was under the impression that her military schooling would count as college credit but found that not to be the case when she returned in spring of 2014.
Scott said she was told by numerous members of the NC State Veterans Affairs Office that she would not be given credit for her upper-level military experience before presenting her case to Vice Provost Louis Hunt, who helped start a process to get her credit recognized by the NC State VA.
“Essentially, all NC State was willing to give me was credit for basic training—P.E. and the naval science 110 course—but not give me credit for the seven months I spent slaving away in intel school,” Scott said. “There was just simply no standard or precedent for it because often courses cannot be directly translated to the civilian sector.”
NC State’s Articulation of Military Credit only offers credit for “lower-level” naval experience, which accounts for completion of basic training and honorable discharge. This experience translates to credit for Naval Science 110 and HESF 101 and 105, which Scott’s experience surpassed.
Hunt described the difficulty in finding matching courses between military and civilian education.
“When you are transferring between two schools like Chapel Hill and State, then yeah, this calculus course is equal to this calculus course, and that history course is equal to this history course—that’s pretty common,” Hunt said. “But when you’re coming from the military, courses are going to differ quite a bit, so introducing [this addendum] makes it so that even if it’s not a one to one match but it would fulfill free electives, then the student can get credit for it.”
Navy veterans must present their Joint Services Transcript (JST) to their specific department before they can be awarded credit. The JST includes American Council on Education’s Military Guide’s recommendations for military courses that translate to college credit, but NC State did not have an articulation for Scott’s level of military education.
Scott and Hunt worked together with Student Senator Tyler Hatch to come up with the Veteran Credit Hours Act, which passed through the student senate in November.
“[Scott and Hatch] made a very good case, and so it got us working, and we started looking at our peer institutions—the 16 peers that we have—and found that most of them had some sort of credit that they would award [for upper-level military experience],” Hunt said.
After the bill passed, Hunt presented the proposal to the academic policy committee, faculty senate, the academic associate deans and the UNC General Administration. Hunt wanted to be sure that the proposal was consistent with the direction that the UNC General Admission was headed, as it is currently reforming its military guidelines for its constituent campuses.
The bill mentioned the military policy at the University of Texas at Austin as a model.
“We thought their system was the most applicable, and we adopted it as closely as possible,” Hunt said.
The University of Texas at Austin offers course credit only for “upper-division baccalaureate category” and does not offer any credit for basic training, according to the UT military transfer credit website. Prior to the addendum, UT’s military credit policy was in direct contradiction to NC State’s policy.
