Program Notes

The Council of College and Military Educators (CCME) Hosts Annual 2009 Conference in Honolulu

CCME’s annual conference is scheduled for January 26–29, 2009, in Honolulu, Hawaii, at the Hawaii Conference Center and Marriott Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa on the island of Oahu. The conference promises to engage military and academic providers from across the continental United States, Europe and the Pacific Command (PACOM) area.

This year’s theme, “Embracing Our Heroes—Shaping Our Worlds: Educating Servicemembers, Spouses and Families,” seeks to honor today’s servicemembers and their families who have achieved high academic standards despite a high operating tempo, multiple deployments, and prolonged periods of separation. Hawaii is home to one of the United States Services’ major combatant or joint commands, PACOM, which contains the highest density of joint forces and component headquarters for its size in the world. With an area of responsibility covering over 50 percent of the world’s surface and 60 percent of its population, the PACOM area of responsibility represents one of the nation’s greatest and most diverse challenges to continuing education of servicemembers and their families.

Guest speakers for this year’s annual symposium include representatives from the Department of Defense, the military services, a panel of experts discussing standards of quality online learning, collegiate representatives from across academia, the American Council on Education, Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges and a student and military spouse panel as well as psychologists who will discuss the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder and temporary brain injury/trauma on learning. A highlight of the annual symposium includes a presentation on the new Post 9/11 Montgomery G.I. Bill and benefit discussion from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

For more information, visit: www.ccme.org

Your Military to Civilian Transition: 2008 Trends

For servicemembers experiencing their transition from the military this year, it’s worth looking at a few of the hiring trends that companies are engaging in this year.

According to a Gannet News Service article by Dana Knight, one of the major keys for companies this year is to hire candidates quickly before competitors can snatch them up.In the past companies might invite candidates back for multiple rounds of interviews–sometimes lasting weeks–many companies now have all the decision makers meet the job candidate at one time. This allows the company to make a quick decision and then make a job offer.

Here are some other trends that servicemembers undergoing their military career transition can expect this year:

Internet Background Search - Companies are increasingly plugging a candidate’s name into search engines and seeing what they can find out about someone. Service members should be aware that companies may take a peak at their “My Space” page; military personnel shouldn’t post information or photos online that paint a negative picture of them.

Video Resumes - Employers are more open to video resumes; and though this is still a new format, wearing a business suit and keeping your speech conservative and relevant to the potential job is a good bet.

Benefits, More Money - There is a shortage of good job candidates in a lot of fields–that means companies will do more to get you. Many candidates can expect better health care benefits and increased salaries on initial offers.

What Makes a College ‘Military Friendly?'

by Doug Lederman

More and more colleges are seeking to enroll members of the military (and, increasingly, their spouses), viewing service members as an attractive pool of students who are eager to learn and able to pay, with significant financial support from the federal government.

But as hundreds of college administrators and military education officers gathered in San Francisco this week at the annual meeting of the Council for College and Military Educators, officials on both sides of the equation emphasized in sometimes blunt terms that institutions cannot view military personnel as just another group of students.

“Military friendly” has to be “more than a slogan,” given the unusual needs of members of the military, Robert Bothel, voluntary education chief for the U.S. Coast Guard, told a roomful of college administrators Wednesday. “Look at your Web pages, your policies, all your stuff. If you compared that to what Joe Blow off the street sees, and there’s no difference, how dare you call yourself ‘military friendly.’”

< Bothel hastily added, and most other military officials at the meeting agreed, that the vast majority of institutions are working hard to be (and not just claiming to be) “military friendly.” But they also acknowledged that colleges had lots of reasons to woo servicemen and women — $445 million of them, in fact.

That’s how much the various branches of the military spent on what they call “voluntary education” — that pursued by soldiers, sailors and others on their own time — in the 2006 fiscal year. Bothel said. That represented 840,000 enrollments, with 43,500 service members earning credentials from high school completions to Ph.D.’s.

“There’s money out there to be made, and some schools are making a pretty good living off the military,” Bothel said.

Some of the education is provided on military bases by colleges with contracts or “memorandums of understanding” between branches of the military or individual bases. But increasingly, the education is being offered online, with as much as 75 percent of the instruction offered that way in 2007 to soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan and Navy personnel aboard ships around the world. Service members who want “training assistance” funds, as the military education aid is called, most often work through the education officers in their units in choosing the providers, but they can also enroll directly in (and be marketed to by) individual colleges.

The growth of distance education to serve the military is logical, given the farflung nature of today’s armed forces and the ever-improving technology, but military leaders expressed some concerns about the trend, even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Ileen F. Rogers, director of education for the Army, cited a mix of practical and philosophical reservations. She noted the disruption that occurred this month when several severed undersea cables limited Internet access in the Middle East and Asia. “This caused a great deal of anxiety and worry over connectivity, about soldiers being unable to do their coursework online because somebody cut a cable,” said Rogers.

But more fundamentally, she described herself as an “old fogey” because “I still think it’s romantic to be in a classroom.... I like that kind of stuff, and I kind of hate to see that disappear.”

Rogers’s counterpart for the Navy, Ann Hunter, voluntary education service chief and enlisted education program manager for the Chief of Naval Operations, Training and Education, presented statistics in her presentation to the group Thursday showing that the Navy spent more money for fewer courses for fewer sailors in fiscal 2007 compared to 2006. “I’m not being critical, I’m just simply saying, from the Navy perspective, and from a business perspective, we’re not getting as much benefit from our money as in the past.” (According to Carolyn Baker, the Pentagon’s deputy under secretary for military community and family policy, the Navy and Air Force saw drops in the number of servicemembers taking college courses, while the Army and Coast Guard saw sizable increases.)

Distance education courses cost the service $80 more per credit hour on average than in-class courses, Hunter said, and to her dismay, sailors were twice as likely to fail or withdraw from online courses. The Navy plans further study about why, she said, because “if we’re going to spend more money for distance learning, we want to make sure we’re getting the biggest bang for our buck.”

Given the pounding that college officials are taking from politicians and families about their prices, it probably was not surprising that it was a common theme from military officers as well. Hunter pointed out that Navy policy calls for books and fees unrelated to a specific course not to be covered by the service’s training assistance funds. But she said the service is increasingly finding that books and certain fees are included — “and I don’t want to use the word ‘masked’ — in some colleges’ tuitions. “There have been some creative ways of getting around our policies,” she said.

Such policies are certainly not “military friendly,” Bothel said in his Wednesday presentation about how colleges should treat servicemen and women. “We still have members paying a parking fee, and they’re sitting on a cutter taking a class. And we don’t need your health fee — the military has the best health care around.”

Doug Lederman is editor of Inside Higher Ed (http://www.insidehighered.com), a new daily online publication covering higher education.

* Compiled by KMI Media Group staff