In Pursuit of Friendly Forces
Written by Ted McKenna
Schools Step Up Promotional Efforts to Lure Military-
Related Students Eligible for New Education Benefits.
August 1 is the start date for payments to begin by the Department of Veterans Affairs for benefits under the Post-9/11 Bill, but the VA said that it has already received more than 60,000 applications since it first began accepting them online May 1. As many as 460,000 students will use the benefits in the coming year, the VA estimates, equal to a 20 percent to 25 percent increase in the total number of people using VA education programs.
With the downturn in school endowments and the strain that job losses and other effects of the current U.S. economy have on students’ ability to pay for schooling, colleges and universities say the bigger pool of prospective students with tuition, book money and even housing stipends practically in hand and ready to spend is attractive indeed.
U.S. Army Major General William Matz (Ret.), the president of the National Association of Uniformed Services, based in Springfield, Va., whose organization helped lobby for the new GI Bill and continues to push for changes and improvements to DoD education benefits, noted that colleges and universities certainly have a variety of reasons for attracting veterans as students, but that the veterans themselves face the same tough job market as everyone else.
“There’s a keen interest in it right now,” Matz noted. “Because of the economic downturn, there’s a general idea about taking advantage of education opportunities. If it’s difficult to find a job, people think about going back to school. It’s the same thing with military recruiting, too. We’re seeing an upswing in recruiting because of the economy.”
GETTING READY
Angelia Millender, vice president for student affairs and enrollment management at Broward College, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said her school is planning for record enrollment in the fall in no small part because of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which she estimates will boost enrollment of veterans at Broward by about 25 percent.
Millender said efforts made by her school in anticipation of the influx of additional students include changes to the Website to highlight information on the school’s military-related services; creating a veterans’ “corner” in the student newspaper and a Student Veterans of America chapter; meeting with the local VA hospital psychological counselor and doctors to better understand the psychological services some veterans need; and attending conferences, Webinars and other types of forums around the country for information on the new education benefits.
“Last year, when we saw this coming, we began to engage with our local veterans’ Iraq and Afghanistan centers in Broward County and our local VA office,” Millender said. “From these meetings, we validated that getting information to the vets about their benefits is one of the biggest challenges. With that said, we hosted these centers on our campuses over the past year, and we are hosting special student orientations and open houses for veterans in partnership with these local veterans agencies.”
Outreach by schools around the country to prospective students comes in a number of forms, including advertising on the radio and in military-focused publications and on billboards and other places. The Metropolitan College of New York, for instance, bought ad space at 75 subway stops in the New York City area. Outreach by schools typically also includes phone calls and visits to education service offices near particular campuses as well as nearby VA hospitals and local chapters of veterans’ groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and participating in education fairs at military bases and elsewhere.
Tracey Moon, the military advocate with Kalamazoo-based Western Michigan University’s advocacy office for transfer and military affairs, said she meets frequently with representatives at the local VA hospital, in Battle Creek, Mich., so that they know they can refer patients to her who are interested in higher education. In turn, she keeps up to date about veterans’ medical and other issues and knows how to help refer Western Michigan students to VA sources of information.
Moon noted that serving as a military student liaison can entail a whole range of activities. When people deploy, for example, they may need help withdrawing from classes without losing credit. “We’ll help them navigate the system to withdraw from the course, to get an incomplete or to complete the classes online,” Moon said. “When they come back, we’ll help them interface with the financial aid office. Or if they are struggling, say in a big class, I can help them interface with the faculty, to encourage them to talk to professors. Maybe they’ve only been back for a week; that’s a bit of a transition. If they are struggling to do that, I can accompany them. And I can be a resource for faculty members as well, who may have questions about returning servicemembers.”
HOUSING STIPENDS
Dr. Vinton Thompson, president of the Metropolitan College of New York (MCNY), in Manhattan, noted that the benefits of the new GI Bill certainly make military-related students attractive prospects. Currently, eight of the MCNY’s approximately 1,000 students are studying at the school using VA benefits of some sort. To draw in more enrollments of military-related students, MCNY is doing all of the outreach many other schools are doing, as well as emphasizing that students would likely be eligible for the full New York City-area housing allowance of $13,000 for the year—no small amount for such an expensive housing area, Thompson noted.
“[Our outreach is] new and stimulated by the Post-9/11 GI Bill,” Thompson said. “When we looked at this population we thought they would be a natural population, because of the array of practical programs we offer. It certainly is attractive to have students who can’t [otherwise] afford us. But we also thought that we really fit with their needs.”
For some schools, though, the new education benefits as they stand right now have actually prompted less outreach. Tom Finaly, vice president of administration for Cypress, Calif.-based TUI University, said that the lack of a housing allowance for online-only higher or continuing education institutions such as his is hurting distance-education schools in general. Under the current rules, veterans pursing degrees or coursework online can only be able to get housing stipends if they also spend some time in class at a local state university campus.
“It hurts the whole segment,” Finaly said. “I don’t know anybody [in online distance education] that was able to combat that [provision in the new GI bill] right now. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. We have actually lowered our outreach to the VA population as a result. We do see that we are losing their attention. But we have increased our outreach to participants in the [new education benefits] who are on active duty, because if the servicemembers are not using the benefits themselves, they can potentially pass the benefits to their dependents, who already get housing benefits.”
EVOLVING BENEFITS
Overall, outreach to enrolling veterans and servicemembers is expected to grow throughout the country, not least because of the increasing number of participants in the new Yellow Ribbon program, in which the VA provides matching funds to colleges and universities whose tuition is more than the allowed public school rate in their particular state. Total Yellow Ribbon participants are expected to number nearly 750 this year, according to an unofficial tally by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Modification to the new benefits may also trigger more interest by schools. For example, the rule about housing stipends and online education may be further modified in the future, Finaly said. Experts also expect some changes to the rules about tuition rates in California, whose public colleges and universities don’t officially change tuition, only “fees.” Because the subsidies for fees by the various VA education benefit plans—including the older Montgomery Bill—are far less than the tuition rates of private schools in California, and no subsidies are provided for tuition there, participation in the Yellow Ribbon program is as a result very expensive for private schools in the state. California’s state legislature is currently considering legislation to fix the problem, but the state is also in the midst of a budget crisis that makes all additional spending decisions difficult, experts say.
Tobias Guzman, assistant vice president for enrollment management and student access at the University of Northern Colorado, also noted that there may also be plenty more veterans and current servicemembers checking out the new education benefits the next two to three years as a result of the recent change in White House administration. More servicemembers will be coming home as the number of forces in Iraq is reduced, and many may well use some of that post-deployment time to think about what they could do next in their lives. ♦