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<h1>Beyond ‘Best Practices’: Rethinking How We Build Cultures of Veteran Support in Higher Education</h1>

<div id="MainImg" style="margin-bottom:20px;margin-top:5px;"><img src="https://images.higheredjobs.com/images/articles/article_4812_1.jpg" alt="Group of higher ed professionals discussing goals." class="" style="" /><div class="ArticleCaption">Nadya_Art/Shutterstock</div></div>

<div id="article-byline">by R.J. Jenkins, David Keefe</div>

<div id="article-content"><strong>Thursday, August 20, 2026</strong> -
<p>Over the past decade, we've attended dozens of conferences and convenings focused on veteran support in higher education, and we've noticed a striking pattern. Conferences and other professional gatherings seem to trade primarily in one kind of currency: best practices. Everywhere you turn, colleagues are sharing best practices for serving veterans, building support ecosystems, increasing retention, improving transition outcomes, and structuring campus programming. The more we hear that phrase, the more we find ourselves pausing over it. Every time someone tells us that something is a 'best practice,' we can't help but think: Best for whom? Best for what kind of students? Best for what type of institution? Best for a well-resourced flagship university with a full veteran support staff, or best for a rural community college with a single school certifying official wearing five different hats? Best for campuses serving large veteran populations, or campuses where military-connected students are primarily dependents and spouses? Best for institutions with deep community partnerships and strong senior leadership support, or best for schools trying to build veteran support with little funding and limited institutional buy-in? The more we think about it, the more it seems that this simple phrase - 'best practices' - often raises more questions than it answers. When we talk about supporting veterans as though there is a universally transferable formula for success, we risk overlooking the very thing that matters most: context.</p>

 <p>There's another problem with the phrase 'best practices,' one that often goes unnoticed since it is embedded so deeply in the language itself, and because it is so often wielded by well-intentioned, collegial practitioners. The word 'best' is a superlative. It denotes the highest quality, the greatest excellence, the option that surpasses all others. We affix it, like a gold star, to the thing we deem the most suitable, the most effective, the most desirable, the most impactful. It is, by definition, the most exclusive - and thereby, the least inclusive - word we could use to describe how this work should be done.</p>

 <p>The irony here is difficult to ignore. Higher education rightly prides itself on values like inclusion, belonging, and equity, yet when we gather together to share our work, we often do so in language that quietly sorts practices - and by extension, institutions and people - into categories of worthy and not worthy, exemplary and insufficient, 'best' and everything else. Most of us do not intend this harm, of course. But language shapes culture, and culture shapes how people experience themselves within a professional community. Many higher education professionals come to conferences not because they have everything figured out, but precisely because they are searching for ideas, trying to solve problems, and doing the best they can within real institutional constraints. When they hear the phrase 'best practices' over and over again, what they could hear instead is:</p>

 <p>'You're behind.'</p>

 <p>'What you're doing isn't enough.'</p>

 <p>'Your work is inferior.'</p>

 <p>'You're failing.'</p>

 <p>Over time, this language doesn't just shape how people feel; it begins to structure how institutions are evaluated, compared, and even funded. What starts as a colloquial phrase among peers gradually becomes a standard against which some campus cultures are seen as exemplary and others broken. Rather than creating spaces of shared learning and collaborative growth, we could be unintentionally creating spaces where colleagues feel diminished - where less-resourced, less-staffed, or less-established is understood to mean less 'best.'</p>

 <p>This is bad. But we have good news. There's a simple, powerful fix. Let's talk about it.</p>

 <h2 class="">The Comfort - and the Cost - of 'Best Practices'</h2>
 <p>In higher education, the term 'best practices' has become a shorthand for excellence. It signals confidence, legitimacy, and authority. For many institutions eager to strengthen their veteran support programs, adopting best practices can feel like a quick route to credibility.</p>

 <p>But that familiar language carries a hidden cost. When it comes to serving veterans, the idea that there exists a single 'best' way to do things risks flattening the incredible diversity of institutions and the veterans they serve.</p>

 <p>Too often, best practices are presented as plug-and-play solutions - strategies meant to be replicated rather than re-imagined. And they're often shared without context: without understanding the particular students a school serves, without knowing the resource landscape of the institution, without appreciating the regional ecosystems that surround and interact with it.</p>

 <h2 class="">One Size Rarely Fits All</h2>
 <p>Consider two veteran-serving campuses. One is a small rural community college serving primarily part-time, first-generation students, most of whom commute to campus, juggling jobs and families. The other is a large urban research university with dedicated funding, a well-appointed veteran center, and a team of full-time staff. Both are deeply committed to their veterans, but their contexts are different.</p>

 <p>When each is told to adopt the same best practices - build a lounge, launch a boutique mentorship program, expand benefits advising, offer a veteran-specific orientation - they're being asked to conform to a model that may not fit their respective institutional realities. Large-scale initiatives that may work well at big schools with big veteran populations may strain the budget, staff, or service culture of smaller schools. Conversely, interventions built on deep, sustained relationships and transformational advising may be difficult to execute at scale in larger educational settings.</p>

 <p>Encouraging institutional mimicry without attending carefully to institutional context can lead to frustration, burnout, and suboptimal outcomes. Instead of building on their strengths, campuses feel compelled to chase an anointed checklist. In the process, they risk missing the creative, locally rooted solutions that might really move the needle for their veterans.</p>

 <h2 class="">Context Is Key</h2>
 <p>Every institution has a unique ecosystem. Student demographics, administrative structures, financial resources, and surrounding communities vary dramatically. Some campuses have access to robust local veteran networks; others operate in near isolation.</p>

 <p>These variables shape everything - from program design to student engagement to sustainability. Failing to attend carefully to them, as the best practices model is prone to do, can unintentionally reproduce inequities, silence the perspectives of unique institutions, and promote methodologies that work well for institutions large enough and well-resourced enough to tout them at conferences and in print.</p>

 <p>Understanding context isn't just the prelude to the work of cultural support - it is the work. It is the ongoing process through which institutions learn who their students are, how they move through systems, and where support interventions promote or fail to promote stronger outcomes for them.</p>

 <p>At the <a href="https://veterans.columbia.edu/">Columbia University Center for Veteran Transition and Integration</a> (CVTI), we encourage schools to start with listening to: student veterans, the staff who support them, the faculty who teach them in their classrooms, and the community partners who complement their work. When institutions listen carefully, they begin to design programs that are effective, dynamic, responsive, and authentic.</p>

 <h2 class="">From 'Best Practices' to 'Working Practices'</h2>
 <p>At CVTI, we prefer a different phrase: 'working practices.'</p>

 <p>Working practices reflect what's actually working in a given institutional context. They acknowledge that success is contextual, dynamic, and shaped by people and place. If something you're doing at your school is helping you achieve stronger, measurable outcomes for your student veterans, then congratulations: you've developed a working practice!</p>

 <p>And we can even go further. Working practices reflect what is working right now, in a particular place, under particular conditions. They are provisional, revisable, and dependent on continued attention, because the spaces we work in are constantly evolving. An approach that was highly effective on your campus for the past two years may not be as effective this year - and that's okay! - so long as you can work to identify what has changed and evolve your approach accordingly.</p>

 <p>A large university might hire a full-time veteran career counselor. A small college might cross-train its existing advising staff. Both are valid. Both can serve veterans well. The measure of quality isn't whether a program matches an external template; it's whether it meets real needs - your students' needs - with integrity and sustainability.</p>

 <p>This shift in language does more than tidy up semantics. It reorients the entire approach. Instead of trying to replicate someone else's success or checklist, schools learn to adapt thoughtfully to and within their own ecosystem.</p>

 <p>A 'working practice' is not something that claims to be perfect - it's something that works where you are.</p>

 <h2 class="">Communities of Practice: Learning, Not Imitating</h2>
 <p>Moving away from best practices doesn't mean rejecting shared learning. It means reimagining how that learning happens, and what we do with it.</p>

 <p>Rather than experts handing down 'best' solutions from on high, CVTI encourages our partner institutions to curate and engage with communities of practice - networks of professionals who learn together through conversation, reflection, experimentation, and vulnerability. These communities are most effective when they remain attentive to who is speaking, whose experiences are centered, and which institutional voices may be underrepresented.</p>

 <p>In these communities, practitioners share what they've tried, what they've learned, what they'd change, and why. Success stories are offered not as formulas to be replicated but as invitations to adapt and be inspired. Failures are discussed openly as sources of wisdom and opportunities to do the work better. While we never aspire to failure, we appreciate the extraordinary teacher it is.</p>

 <p>This kind of peer-based learning builds confidence and an ability to adapt to the surroundings. It reminds participants that innovation is possible even with limited resources, that small institutions often produce some of the most nimble, high-impact approaches in the field, and critically, that none of us need, nor should, do this work alone.</p>

 <h2 class="">Listening as Foundational Working Practice</h2>
 <p>If there's a single throughline to this reframe, it's listening.</p>

 <p>Listening is how working practices are born. It's how institutions learn what matters to their veterans and discover where institutional assumptions may be off base. It's the central technology we use to build relationships and trust across departments and business units, and it's the key to growing sustainable, catalytic systems of support on our campuses.</p>

 <p>At CVTI, we see listening not as a nice-to-have soft skill or a form of office courtesy, but as a core professional competency and executive function - one that requires time, humility, consistency, and attention. And it's not something only individuals do; it's something culture can demand. Listening as a working practice can be structured and systematized, and it can be built into the workflow institutions use to make important decisions. It's what transforms transactional service models into communities of care.</p>

 <h2 class="">A Living, Evolving Practice</h2>
 <p>The work of supporting veterans and military-connected students is never finished. It evolves with each new cohort, each policy change, each administrative reshuffle, each shift in campus culture. What we are really reevaluating here is not just our shared terminology, but our institutional orientations. Either we approach this work as something to standardize, or something to learn from and continually adjust. The difference may seem subtle, but it fundamentally shapes how institutions engage with their students, their staff, their own capacity to grow, and with each other. What matters most is not the pursuit of perfection - not the quest for 'best' - but the commitment to responsiveness, the promise to make a good-faith attempt to meet the moment for your students.</p>

 <p>By abandoning the illusion of universal best practices, institutions open the door to deeper learning, co-created opportunity, and more sustainable change. They build programs that fit their realities, empower their people, serve their students with authenticity, and promote stronger outcomes.</p>

 <p>The goal isn't to copy what works elsewhere - it's to listen, learn, and lead from where you are.</p>

<div class="article-footer"><small><h3 class="">The CVTI Approach</h3> <p>At CVTI, our work is grounded in this belief. We help aspirational colleges, universities, and employers build their capacity to create cultures of veteran support that are responsive to their own institutional and regional contexts. No best practices here, but working practices abound!</p> <p>CVTI helps institutions put this philosophy into practice through our Flash Diagnostic, a facilitated assessment designed to help colleges and universities take an honest look at how they currently support veterans and military-connected students. Rather than measuring a campus against someone else's checklist of 'best practices' - and rather than handing institutions some proprietary framework that we tell them they should strive to implement - we offer the Flash Diagnostic, a tool that brings stakeholders together to identify the working practices already producing value, identify gaps and opportunities within their particular ecosystem, and better articulate why their work matters. Just as importantly, it helps institutions move beyond counting programs, events, and students served toward asking a more consequential question: What outcomes are we trying to create for veterans, and how do we know our work is helping to create those outcomes? In that sense, the Flash Diagnostic isn't a scorecard, and it isn't a prescription - it's a structured invitation to listen, reflect, learn, and build from where you are. Because the goal shouldn't be to become someone else's version of 'best.' The goal should be to understand what works for your veterans, on your campus, and to keep making it work better.</p> <p>If you'd like to learn more about CVTI's <span class="c1">free</span> Flash Diagnostic tool, explore what's working on your campus, or partner with us to strengthen or better articulate the impact of your veteran support efforts, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to us at <a href="mailto:cvti@columbia.edu" class="c2">cvti@columbia.edu</a>. After all, we bet some of the coolest, most impactful working practices are ones we haven't heard about yet.</p> <p> Disclaimer: HigherEdMilitary encourages free discourse and expression of issues while striving for accurate presentation to our audience. A guest opinion serves as an avenue to address and explore important topics, for authors to impart their expertise to our higher education audience and to challenge readers to consider points of view that could be outside of their comfort zone. The viewpoints, beliefs, or opinions expressed in the above piece are those of the author(s) and don't imply endorsement by HigherEdMilitary. </p></small></div>
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