Moving Up in the Ranks: UMass Amherst Climbs the 2025 U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges for Veterans List

Throughout the lower-level corridors of Dickinson Hall at 155 Hicks Way are traditional classroom and office spaces that anyone would associate with an established academic facility on a college campus. However, the staff members and students within these spaces are anything but traditional or typical. 

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Dickinson Hall, named after U.S. Army captain Walter Mason Dickinson who served as professor of military science at UMass Amherst in the late 1800s, houses the Student Veterans Resource Center (SVRC) and Veterans Services, a unit of Student Affairs and Campus Life. Its mission: to actively support student veterans, service members and eligible family members to succeed in their pursuit of a UMass Amherst education and post-graduate employment.  

According to SVRC Director and retired Army veteran Matt Bachmann, UMass Amherst has approximately 400 students who are veterans and active-duty service members. Of those students, most are undergraduates, followed by students in graduate and online programs, such as Isenberg School of Management BBA and MBA, UWW Interdisciplinary Studies and UMass Flexible Education.  

Earlier this fall, U.S. News & World Report announced UMass Amherst ranks No. 34 in the 2025 Best Colleges for Veterans among more than 166 colleges. The university climbed up six spots from last year’s ranking and stands as the only public university in the top 35 in New England. 

Among the criteria for this ranking, the institution must be certified for the GI Bill and place in the top half of one of the 2025 Best Colleges ranking categories – UMass Amherst ranks No. 58 among  national universities. More on the ranking’s methodology can be found here.

Next door to Bachmann’s office in the SVRC is UMass alumnus and Military Certification Specialist Michael Chan, who serves as the school’s primary Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) certifying official and Bursar’s Office contact for students.  Both can attribute the climb in the Best Colleges for Veterans ranking to a number of factors, including the special services, benefits and discounts available to its students who range in age from 18 to 40-plus and utilize military education benefits like the GI Bill to pay for their education.
 

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One new benefit is priority enrollment or early registration, which was available exclusively for ROTC students, student-athletes and seniors who have first pick of classes due to their upper-level status.

“Military education benefits are generally time-limited and not necessarily linearly. For example, the GI Bill is 36 months, and some classes are only offered one semester of the year. So, someone potentially could be on track to graduate but they need this one class, but they didn’t get in it. They’d have to stay a whole another year and they may run out of their benefits,” Bachmann explains. “[Priority enrollment] has been very helpful and the students were so happy when they were first able to do this.” 

Other benefits include enrollment fee deferment and extra time for missed classes or exams due to military orders such as weekend drills. Residential students who are deployed are provided support for class and housing withdrawal procedures, and housing fees are prorated based upon their return to campus.  Students also receive a discount for on-campus parking, the campus store and meals at campus dining locations, such as Blue Wall.

The SVRC also offers programming specific to veterans throughout the academic year, such as a welcome orientation, résumé and interview workshops, cross cultural activities and a special graduation ceremony.  

Ask Bachmann, Chan or any student, and they may say the highest-ranking benefit is the SVRC student lounge, located down the hall from the computer lab and across from Bachmann’s office. 

On a Monday afternoon in early November, the space was filled with students working at the table with their laptops. They share more than collaboration on their studies. 

Dalya Wambui is a junior psychology major from Worcester and Army National guardsman who served in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Kenya. She sat across from Eric Hazen, a Marine from Acton, Mass., studying mechanical engineering.

“A lot of the veterans are commuters,” Hazen said. “The off-campus student center is nice, but here it’s double-nice because you’re just hanging out with a bunch of people who you can better relate to. You can just hang out here and kind of let your guard down.”

Also at the table was Principe Gasasira, a second year Army National guardsman from Worcester, Lance Miller of Needham, Mass., who is in the USMC Reserves studying mechanical engineering, and Rob White, who served 21 years in the USMC and is a senior in the Building and Construction Technology program.

Bachmann served in the Army for 20 years and was deployed to Iraq in 2003 and Afghanistan in 2009. He was stationed at several other locations in the U.S. before his retirement from service in 2014, and he came to UMass Amherst two years later. He understands that the student veterans and active-duty members have a lot to balance with service, families and finances to name a few. 

White thanks Bachmann and Chan for cultivating a different culture at the SVRC than what takes place on other parts of campus. Early next year, the SVRC will move to a renovated and updated space in the Goodell Building. As much as the students will miss the coziness of the lower level of Dickinson Hall, the community will remain the same. 

“There's obviously like a big age gap between some of the veterans and the traditional student population. So, when we all come here, even though we're varying in age from our early 20s to 50s, we have a shared experience and we all kind of feel like we have our own community here,” Wambui said. “It feels nice. Even though you can feel like a stranger on campus, you don't feel like a stranger here.”

For more information about the services offered to veterans by UMass Amherst, visit https://www.umass.edu/veterans.