Paying for College with a Tour in Afghanistan
The new Post-9/11 GI Bill could mean more veterans start enrolling in higher education, from community colleges to Ivy League institutions.
By Kay Steiger
June 29, 2009
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Judge John G. Roberts raises his right hand as he is sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 12, 2005.
The original Montgomery GI Bill funded the educations of 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, and two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, according to Edward Hume’s book on the history of the GI Bill. But a recent study by shows that because the buying power of the GI Bill has diminished over time, current benefits are most often applied to community colleges.
Those statistics could change this fall as increased benefits under a new version of the GI Bill will help veterans cover a larger portion of the cost of four-year colleges and universities. The Post-9/11 GI Bill, sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) and signed into law by President Bush last June, is designed to cover the full cost of veterans attending in-state public institutions. The legislation is a major step in making the GI Bill progressive again, but it still has some major kinks that need to be worked out.
“What I think is going to happen is not that there’s going to be a mass exodus from community colleges, but rather people are going to finish their four years of school,” says Patrick Campbell, legislative director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a lobbying group that counts more than 125,000 veterans and supporters among its members. “Instead of getting their associate’s at a community college and then stopping, they’re going to move from there to a four-year university, or some will just go straight to a four-year university to begin with.”
Veterans currently make up about 3 percent of all undergraduates, but under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, that number may increase. Veterans are now eligible for the maximum benefit of full in-state tuition coverage after 36 cumulative months of active duty; a lesser benefit is available to those who have served less active duty time. For the many veterans who have served multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, this means they’ll be better able to afford a four-year degree. Veterans can also collect on the new GI Bill benefit for up to 15 years after they are discharged from service.
These new benefits are more generous than the old Montgomery GI Bill, which paid veterans a standard rate based on time served. For instance, individuals who served more than three years in the Army received a standard fee to cover tuition, fees, housing, and books. But this payment had several problems: It often did not cover the cost of attending a four-year institution, failed to capture geographic cost differences, and required congressional action to adjust the benefit to keep up with increasing costs, leaving benefits subject to political pressures.
Instead, the new GI Bill is dynamic. For example, a veteran of more than three years living in Texas could enroll in the University of Texas at Austin (or any other less-expensive public college in the state) and would have the Veterans Administration (VA) cover all of his or her tuition this year, a $4,477 benefit plus fees. The new GI Bill also provides separate housing benefits, calculated based on cost of living in the area, and up to $1,000 a year for textbooks. Veterans attending an out-of-state college, private institution, or graduate program with higher tuition will receive a benefit equal to the cost of their state’s most expensive public school, but are responsible for making up the difference.
Private and out-of-state colleges want to attract veterans as well, but doing so requires lessening the burden of the finding thousands of dollars to pay tuition not covered by the new GI Bill. The Yellow Ribbon Program is designed to help close that gap for some veterans. “We felt it important to put in place some measure that would provide sufficient funding to enable veterans to consider private colleges and universities as well as out of state charges at public institutions,” outgoing Dartmouth President James Wright said this February at the annual meeting for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) in Washington, D.C. “We wanted to give them as many options as possible, just as the 1944 GI Bill and the Vietnam era bill did for those veterans.”
Veterans can always apply their benefits to a more expensive out-of-state or private college, but the Yellow Ribbon Program is for colleges and universities that want to use institutional scholarships to make up the difference for veterans. (A state-by-state list of participating schools can be found here). NAICU, which lobbies for private, non-profit colleges and universities, estimates that “at least 575 private, nonprofit colleges and universities have submitted Yellow Ribbon participation agreements,” according to a statement they released this week.
“These numbers really are pretty excellent for the first year of a new program,” says Susan Hattan, senior consultant at NAICU. “We’ve been really pleased with the results.”
Still, the way the VA calculated benefits for the GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program can have an adverse effect on some veterans. California is particularly problematic because it has a unique way of calculating tuition. Because California public schools don’t charge tuition (instead charging thousands of dollars in “fees”), the applied tuition benefit to veterans attending private California schools is essentially $0.
“The way that VA came up with these [figures] is arbitrary,” Campbell says. “They used an arbitrary rule that was not in the legislation or in the regulations. That ruling needs to change. We believe we need to create a fair, equitable, and generous benefit that applies across the board.”
This isn’t the first time national higher education benefits had to undergo changes to adapt to California’s unique tuition system. The Higher Education Act even had to amend its language to say tuition and fees were the same thing in California, Hattan says. But the GI Bill didn’t explicitly address California schools. Because of the disparities in the way the VA calculated the benefits, highlighted by the problem in California, it’s likely that the legislation will be opened up again for a public policy debate.
A second concern about the new GI Bill is that benefits can’t be applied retroactively to classes taken before Aug. 1, 2009. For veterans such as Campbell, who recently finished his law degree, this means he will derive little advantage from the new benefits. “I owe over $100,000 in student loan debt and that debt is going to be with me for the next 10 to 15 years,” he says. “Of course I wish I had that [new] GI Bill. … I’d be able to look at jobs that I’m not able to look at now.” (The ability to transfer the new GI Bill benefit to spouse or child also isn’t retroactive.)
While still imperfect, the new GI Bill is an important step to finally helping them keep up with the skyrocketing costs of higher education, especially by encouraging more veterans to complete a four-year education. Perhaps the Millennial generation of veterans, thanks to this legislation, will produce more Nobel Prize winners.
Kay Steiger is the associate editor of Campus Progress.
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