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Many colleges and universities, including many selective institutions, may choose to drop out of the military's tuition assistance program for active-duty service members if changes are not made to Defense Department guidelines, several higher education groups warned Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in a letter Monday. The colleges take issue with new guidelines intended to ensure better quality control for programs that receive tuition assistance. Instead, the groups say, the guidelines go too far in prescribing how programs must award academic credit and process student payments, among other issues.
Several higher education associations have asked the Department of Defense to withdraw a new memorandum of understanding outlining the guidelines colleges and universities must follow if they wish to award educational assistance to military service members, citing requirements that the groups say are "incompatible" with many colleges' academic policies and practices. (Note: NAICU is one of the signatories to the letter.)
Life has come full circle for the military and Columbia University. In 1947, Columbia opened its School of General Studies to accommodate returning World War II veterans whose education was financed by the G.I. Bill. During the Vietnam War protest years, veterans all but disappeared from campus and stayed disappeared for decades. And now, in good part thanks to passage of the Post 9/11 G.I. Bill in 2008, veterans are returning in numbers not seen in half a century.
As hundreds of thousands of troops return from Afghanistan and Iraq and take advantage of the education benefits in the Post-9/11 GI Bill, broad efforts are under way to smooth the transition from battlefield to classroom. To go from a highly structured, team-focused environment to the individualized experience of academics can be a bit of a shock, veterans say. Or to hear young classmates complaining about a test may be frustrating when you've been tested by life-and-death scenarios in war.
Beginning in January 2012, colleges will need to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Defense in order to receive tuition assistance payments on behalf of service members. The new requirement grows out of broad congressional concerns about the integrity of federal student aid programs. And in a related development, the DoD has at least temporarily backed away from plans to reduce service members' tuition assistance benefit amounts.
News coverage of a report released in September by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, included incorrect numbers calculated by the committee. The panel announced its error on Thursday. Rather than tallying the one-year increase in veterans' education benefits, the committee mistakenly used two-year data. The change means that those colleges increased their benefits by 86 percent compared with the previous award year, not 159 percent, as the committee had previously reported.
The promise of a GI Bill that fully pays for a four-year college education could be eroding. The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the 12-member bipartisan panel empowered to come up with $1.2 trillion in cuts in federal spending, has before it a plan to cut $7 billion from veterans education benefits over 10 years by capping the annual increase in tuition rates at 3 percent.
Four decades after Vietnam War protesters cheered the departure of ROTC programs from some Ivy League universities, their return is bringing little more than a symbolic change to campuses where a new generation of students is neither organizing against them nor lining up to enlist. The antagonism with elite universities faded with the end of the draft, and much of the lingering opposition to the military dissolved with last year's repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," the policy that banned gays from serving openly in the armed services. The universities said the policy violated non-discrimination rules for campus organizations.
The Marine Corps announced Tuesday it has slashed tuition assistance by 75 percent for servicemembers who take classes on their off-duty time.
Even lobbyists for for-profit colleges must be stunned by their industry's ability over the past two years to capture an enormous share of Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits earned by Iraq and Afghanistan war era veterans. During the 2010-11 academic year, VA disbursed $4.4 billion Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits to nearly 6000 institutions. Almost one quarter of those dollars - $1.02 billion - was paid to just eight for-profit companies. The top seven GI Bill payment recipients were all for-profit companies.
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