After more than a decade in enrollment management, I walked into a room full of institutions actively designing for military students — and realized California’s public higher education system was almost entirely absent from the conversation.

I’ve spent over ten years in higher education enrollment management. I’ve analyzed markets, designed recruitment funnels, and built strategies around demographic shifts. I thought I understood how institutions engage with military and veteran students.

Then I attended the Annual Conference of the Council for College and Military Educators (CCME) for the first time — and I had to reckon with something I didn’t see coming.

Out of every California public higher education institution, only one showed up: Bakersfield College.

One. In a state with an estimated 1.5 to 1.6 million veterans. A state with bases, National Guard units, and transition programs woven into communities from San Diego to Sacramento. A state whose community college system explicitly holds priority registration for veteran students.

One seat at the table.

The CPL Conversation I Wasn’t Expecting

When I hear “Credit for Prior Learning” in a California context, I think of JST transcripts, ACE credit recommendations, and CLEP equivalencies. The standard infrastructure. The expected conversation.

What I didn’t expect was the layer underneath it.

Institutions from across the country aren’t just accepting military course credits anymore. They are evaluating military skills and lived experience for CPL. Not MOS codes on a transcript — actual competency assessment. Leadership under pressure. Logistics in resource-constrained environments. Team management, crisis decision-making, and technical mastery built over years of service.

The research on why this matters is hard to argue with.

CPL Outcome	What the Data Shows	Source
Degree completion	Students with CPL are 17% more likely to complete their degree	CAEL / WICHE
Time saved	9–14 months faster to graduation, on average	CAEL / WICHE
Cost savings	$1,500 to $10,200 saved per student	CAEL / WICHE
Credit earned	CPL students take 17 more credits at their institution, not fewer	CAEL / WICHE

That last number is the one enrollment leaders should sit with. CPL doesn’t cannibalize enrollment. It deepens it. Students who have prior learning recognized don’t disappear — they stay, they take more courses, and they complete at higher rates.

Who Is Already Doing This — and What It’s Earning Them

Three institutions came up again and again on the conference floor. Not because they’re perfect, but because they made a deliberate decision to design around this population — and their enrollment reflects it.

Institution	Model	Military-Connected Enrollment
Excelsior University New York	Founded in 1971 for adult learners. CPL across military experience, employer training, certifications, and portfolio assessment. Dedicated Center for Military and Veteran Education. Accepts credit from ACE, NCCRS, JST, and its own PLA program.	~11.85% of total enrollment uses the GI Bill — nearly 4× the national average of 3–4%
SNHU New Hampshire	Accepts up to 90 transfer credits toward a bachelor’s degree — 75% of the full program. Recognizes 600+ work and life experiences for CPL. Dedicated military benefits team. Yellow Ribbon participant. 80-year history of military student support.	Total online enrollment exceeds 134,000 students, with military learners as a structurally supported, growing segment
WGU Utah / National	Competency-based model: students advance by demonstrating mastery, not logging seat time. Military experience accelerates progress organically — no separate CPL process needed. Designated Purple Heart University. VITAL Peer Support program.	Full GI Bill compatibility; military scholarships including the Military Appreciation Scholarship ($2,500/year); all programs VA-approved

These aren’t outlier institutions chasing a niche. They are large, accredited, growing universities that made a strategic bet — that military-connected students are high-value, high-motivation learners who deserve a pathway built around what they already know.

That bet paid off.

California’s Empty Seat: What the Absence Costs

California’s community colleges have Veterans Resource Centers on every campus. Priority registration exists across the entire CCC system. MAP was there. MAP can match a Joint Services Transcript to course equivalencies before a student even enrolls. The infrastructure is real.

But infrastructure is not the same as intentionality.

Being technically available to military students is not the same as actively designing for them, recruiting them, or showing up in the national conversations where this field is evolving.

California has an estimated 1.5–1.6 million veterans. Many are eligible for GI Bill benefits that are ready to be deployed — right now — toward a credential. The question isn’t whether the demand is there. The question is whether California’s institutions are creating the pathways to capture it.

The “safety school” dynamic I wrote about in the CSU application data applies here too. If an institution isn’t actively signaling that it values a specific student population — through policy, through recruitment, through showing up at the conferences where military education is being built — that population will find the institutions that do.

Right now, those institutions are largely in New Hampshire, Utah, and New York. Not San Diego or Los Angeles.

Three Questions California Enrollment Leaders Should Be Asking

Question	Why It Matters
How many of our current students are using GI Bill benefits — and are we tracking them as a distinct cohort?	You cannot design for a population you aren’t measuring. Most public institutions lump veteran students into general enrollment data without disaggregating outcomes, retention, or CPL utilization.
Does our CPL policy recognize military skills and experience — or only military transcripts?	Accepting a JST is table stakes. The institutions gaining ground are going deeper: evaluating leadership experience, technical expertise, and hands-on competency beyond what appears on an ACE evaluation.
When did we last send someone to CCME?	The field of military higher education is moving. Institutions not in the room are not in the conversation — and are ceding ground to those who are.

What Pacific West Academy Is Already Doing

Spotlight — Pacific West Academy

At Pacific West Academy, we didn’t wait for the military student moment to arrive. We built the institution around it.

PWA is VA-approved and holds dual accreditation from ACCET and BPPE — making us the only ACCET-accredited security training provider in California, which enables GI Bill eligibility that other programs in our space cannot offer. Our Certified Executive Security Specialist (CESS) program is designed for students who already carry operational experience, situational awareness, and professional discipline — the exact profile of a transitioning service member.

We also guide students through VA benefit structures that many institutions don’t bother to understand: Post-9/11 GI Bill, Chapter 30, and VR&E (Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment) for eligible veterans with service-connected disabilities. We have campuses in Van Nuys and San Diego — two of the most veteran-dense metro areas in the state.

We’re not a large institution. But size is not the same as fit. For a veteran ready to build a career in executive protection or corporate security, PWA offers something the big enrollment machines often can’t: a program designed for exactly who you are.

The Enrollment Opportunity We Keep Walking Past

After ten years in this field, I’ve learned that enrollment growth doesn’t come from waiting. It comes from recognizing where your next students are — and extending your hand before the competition does.

For California’s public institutions, more than a million veterans are already here. They have benefits. They have motivation. Many of them have been told, implicitly or explicitly, that their experience doesn’t translate into the academic currency required to move forward.

The institutions that change that story — that say your experience counts here, and here is how — will win their enrollment.

The ones that keep sending one delegate or none at all to the conferences where this work is being done will keep watching those students drive to a different campus, or log in to one in another state.

The empty seat at CCME is a choice. It doesn’t have to stay empty.

Roxana Tunc is a marketing operations and enrollment strategy professional at Pacific West Academy, a VA-approved vocational institution offering the Certified Executive Security Specialist program at campuses in Van Nuys and San Diego, California. The Strategic Campus is her independent blog on higher education enrollment, market analysis, and institutional strategy.