Sixteen percent: that’s how much of the marine technology program at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) is made up of United States military veterans.

The local college touted that statistic last week as part of an announcement that it had been recognized as a Military Friendly® School for 2025-26 by MilitaryFriendly.com, a website launched in the early 2000s to boost intentional veteran enrollment at schools and companies nationwide. NMC is one of just two community colleges in Michigan to earn the Military Friendly® badge this year.

In addition, NMC was recognized last year as a gold-level Veteran Friendly School by the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency.

“We've strived for a long time to be a military-friendly school,” says John Lutchko, director of NMC’s Great Lakes Water Studies Institute, which houses the college’s marine technology degree programs. “Those efforts have only grown recently, especially with our recruiter, Ryan Deering, who is a vet himself. Ryan recruits for marine technology, surveying, and all the geospatial programs, and he speaks so well to veterans that are coming through and touring our facilities.”

Deering also leads NMC’s chapter of Student Veterans of America, a nonprofit intended “to provide military veterans with the resources, support, and advocacy needed to achieve their academic goals and gain meaningful employment.”

Overall, NMC has a 4.1 percent veteran enrollment rate, which translated to 127 students during the 2024-25 school year, and 21 graduates who got their degrees as part of this month’s commencement ceremonies. Marine technology outpaces other programs, though offerings like aviation and construction technology tend to be popular among vets as well.

For his part, Lutchko loves leading a program with a high rate of veteran enrollment. Because the marine technology program has so many overlaps with the experience that many ex-military students are bringing to the table, Lutchko says those pupils tend to be among the program’s finest.

“They’re great students, but then when they get out, they also just really position themselves to be so employable, especially in marine technology,” Lutchko says. “Thinking of the Navy folks that we've seen go through our program, they have a lot of offshore experience, a lot of experience of working aboard vessels, and working on similar systems [to what we’re working with in this program]. Years ago, we had a graduate of the two-year program that was a sonar tech in the Navy, and the transition into our program was so seamless for him. He ended up getting a job downstate, doing work with underwater acoustics.”

The skills and hands-on experience that military vets bring to a program like marine technology can also have benefits that ripple outward to the other students in the program. Thanks to NMC’s focus on non-traditional students – veterans included – the college’s programs tend to have a varied mix of ages and demographics, ranging from students coming right out of high school to adults looking to shift careers after a few decades in the workforce. Lutchko says it’s helpful to have that mix because the non-traditional students are “almost by default in a position to mentor the younger students.”

“I see that every single semester,” Lutchko tells The Ticker. “We just had a student, Roger Baty; he was a vet that came in, and that mentorship mentality just came very natural to him. The other students picked up on that right away, and they really latched themselves to him, because they saw, ‘Hey, this guy has had some relevant life experience. I'm going to try to take advantage of that and learn something from him.’ It’s that sort of unspoken leadership that a lot of our veteran students are bringing in, and it really does, I think, help all of our students be successful while they're here.”

A Traverse City resident, Baty graduated with an associate’s degree in marine technology this spring and has since gone to work as a hydrographic surveyor for the Illinois-based Prairie Engineering. As a Navy veteran who spent four years stationed aboard an aircraft carrier as an avionics electronics technician, Baty says he was drawn to NMC in part because of the school’s reputation for being military-friendly.

“One of the things that makes a program military-friendly is it will work with your military background [for college credit],” Baty explains. “Oftentimes, depending on the job you worked in in the military, you can keep a logbook of all of the maintenance you performed and all of the work you did, and then you can turn those things into college credits once you’re out of the military. NMC is very open to that kind of prospect, which was attractive to me.”

Lutchko is hopeful the new military-friendly designation will send more veterans NMC’s way.

“The number one challenge, for any school, is getting students in the door, and it sure helps when we have something like that designation at our fingertips,” Lutchko says. “I hope it allows us to keep building our veteran base, because they really are just such a fantastic addition to the NMC student body. I can't think of a single vet that has gone through our program that has not gone on to be extraordinarily successful in the marine technology industry. They work for big companies that go offshore and do good work, and they reflect well on our school and on Traverse City.”