By Aaron Glantz

ARCATA, California, U.S., Jun 6 (IPS) - Derek Adams played with his two-year-old son on the grounds of Veterans Upward Bound, an outreach and education programme for former U.S. military service members outside the campus of California State University, Humboldt.

A six-hour drive north of San Francisco near California's famed old growth redwood groves, it is the most geographically isolated of the state's 33 public universities.

Adams, 30, just graduated with a bachelor's degree in botany. The Marine Corps vet says it was hard to get back into the swing of school after five years of following orders in the military.

"You just get away from it," he told IPS. "You're told what to do. You just work and work and it's not in a classroom environment. And when you go back to school, there's a lot of students who are lot younger than you. It can be a little weird to be a freshman class, being 26 and all the other kids were 18 just out of high school."

According to the federal Department of Education, veterans have historically been far less likely to graduate from college than students who never served in the military.

The government's most recent data showed only 3 percent of veterans who entered four-year programmes in 1995 had graduated by 2001, compared to 30 percent of students nationwide.

The finding is particularly ironic when one considers that many young people join the military primarily to get money for college. Recruiters promise new enlistees up to 72,000 dollars in education benefits for active duty soldiers and up to 23,000 dollars for the reserves.

But students say getting those benefits can be difficult.

Johnny Avalos is a Marine Corps vet who heard about Veterans Upward Bound while he was attending a community college in Southern California.

"Every time I wanted to get my GI Bill benefits, it was like pulling teeth," he said. "They made me feel guilty that I was going to get my benefits and I thought to myself, I just got out of the Marine Corps and I shouldn't have to feel this way. This is money I put away and I'm trying to get it back."

One day, Avalos said, he happened to be walking down the hallway at school when he saw a poster that said "Veterans Upward Bound at Humboldt State University."

Avalos is now a nursing student at Humboldt State and works as the programme's outreach director.

"I was taking classes at that time, but let's face it, there's no course that you take that prepares you for college," he said. "So I did really substandard in some of my classes. But when I got up here I met people like Dr. Mark Muckleroy, a Vietnam veteran who came through here, and is a PhD now. These people know the system. They've been through the bureaucracy and come out of it and that's what you need."

Veterans Upward Bound offers free 10-week English, math, and other college prep classes to help veterans brush up on material they may have learned in high school but since forgotten. The centre also employs a counselor who helps them with their paperwork and puts them in touch with other veterans' service organisations that provide mental health care and transitional housing.

"That was one of the biggest helps to me," Adams said. "When I came back here I didn't have anywhere to live. So they set me up at the Vets House (homeless housing) for a month until the math and science programme started that summer because they offered both housing and college credit that I could pay for with my GI benefits."

The federal Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that nearly 200,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Nearly 400,000 experience homelessness over the course of a year.

The Veterans Upward Bound programme at Humboldt State is the only one of its kind in California and one of only 44 nationwide. It was founded more than 30 years ago by Vietnam War vets who moved to the northwest coast to check out of mainstream society after serving in an unpopular war.

The programme's counselor, David Ortega Shaw, a Vietnam veteran who has held the job since 1973, told IPS the lack of services for veterans who want to attend college is symptomatic of the way the George W. Bush administration and Congress are paying for the Iraq war.

"The federal government is robbing Peter to pay Paul," he said. "They're funding the war and the military experience currently by taking revenue that deserves to be going to veterans in the form of health, education and welfare. If you get out of the military and you want services, they're not there because they're dropped into a big, dark hole called Iraq and Afghanistan. That's a problem."

Shaw also believes few universities have started programmes like the one at Humboldt because the administrators who run academic institutions in the United States have little in common with the working-class people of colour who make up much of the country's population of veterans.

"The reason they haven't dealt with the veterans as a specific population is the same reason they haven't dealt with the Native American population," he said. "It's out of sight, out of mind. They're on reservations, they're in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're in the ghetto. They're in Oakland. Leave them there. We don't want to deal with them. What do we want to deal with? White Anglo Saxon Protestant college students." (END/2007)