“I wasn't a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but...” — Kevin Powers Quote

I wasn't a good student in high school. I wanted to go to college, but they weren't exactly beating down my door to offer me admission, and it's so expensive in the U.S. If you join up for a period, the army will pay your school and provide a stipend.

One of the things my service in Iraq did give me was this freedom from fear of failure or any kind of expectations that I had to take a standard path.

I think a lot of the guys I know and a lot of people I've talked to, what they want is very often what most people want, a kind of simple life, a livelihood, a family, people who care about them, people they can care about. I think vets on the whole want the same things that everybody else does.

The male role models I had all seemed to have been in the military. My father served in the army. My uncle was in the Marine Corps. Both of my grandfathers served in WWII. There weren't any career soldiers in my family, but when I was young it seemed like a way of arriving at adulthood.

You can take a school like the University of Colorado, with a selective admission standard. It has a better caliber student going in, so you ought to have a better caliber coming out.

But you take a four-year state college, with a broader range of admission, and what happens during those four years may be an even greater value-added educational experience. I don't know.

We have jobs in Maharashtra but outsiders are getting them. They are also getting admission in educational institutions depriving our children of their rights.

The most important factor in college admissions is a test that benefits those who are least prepared for college.