GI Blues

Military recruiters promise 'money for college,' but recent veterans find that tuition benefits fall short

Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Steve F. Kime, former chairman of the Veterans Advisory Committee on Education to the Department of Veterans Affairs, about why veterans frequently fail to use the GI Bill's tuition benefits, even though those benefits are the leading reason recruits sign up. Forum: Read the transcript of an online discussion about whether colleges should be allowed to ban military recruiting on their campuses. Article: High Court to Hear Case on Military Recruiting Printer friendly E-mail article Subscribe Order reprints

By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL

Cheyne Worley graduated from high school at age 16 in 1985 and spent about a year and a half pumping gas and bagging groceries before deciding it was time to get on with his life. Signing up for the Army seemed like the best option -- not only would he keep his family's tradition of military service alive (his grandfather, father, and uncle had all served), but a recruiter's promise of money for college made enlistment a no-brainer.

During his four-year tour of duty as a supply sergeant, Mr. Worley seriously considered a lifelong military career, but a host of injuries and his wife's protests persuaded him to get out at age 22 and use his Montgomery GI Bill college benefit. He figured it would take him four years to complete his bachelor's degree, and he started by taking courses at Johnson County Community College, in Kansas. But the financial pressures of supporting a wife and baby daughter overwhelmed him, and he dropped out after one semester.

"I didn't expect it to be like that," says Mr. Worley. "The benefit just didn't match up to the cost of living,"

For the next 12 years, a variety of war injuries and psychological problems related to gulf-war syndrome made it a struggle for him to do anything but drift from one job to another. Then, in 2003, with his wife working full time and four children, Mr. Worley finally made it back to Johnson County Community College. He hopes to complete his degree in public administration in two more years as a transfer student at the University of Kansas-Edwards. At age 36 and past the deadline to use his GI Bill benefits, he has some advice for young men and women who are thinking of enlisting in the military: "If your main reason for joining is to get money for college, I'd say, Don't do it. You'll be sorely disappointed."

In fact, other veterans, and even officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs, are warning potential enlistees that money for tuition should not be their motivation for joining the U.S. armed forces. New recruits may have trouble hearing that message, however, because military recruiters, who report to the Department of Defense, have a different agenda.

The promise of easing the financial burden of higher education is a recruiter's most effective selling point. According to a 2004 survey conducted by GfK Custom Research, an independent research firm, "money for college" is the leading reason civilians enlist, even as the war in Iraq makes more young people skittish about committing to military service.

The tuition perk offered as part of the Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, has become even more important during the past year, as the military has attempted to reverse declining enlistment numbers by increasing its recruiting staff and its efforts to sign up high-school students. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has also given recruiters more opportunities to reach young people, allowing them access to home phone numbers and addresses of high-school students and the same visiting privileges at secondary schools as college or job recruiters.

And the pitch military representatives make on those campuses sounds good. In exchange for having $1,200 withheld from their first-year military salaries, active-duty soldiers become eligible after completing their enlistment term (three years, on average) for up to $36,144 toward their education expenses. (Those who pay in an additional $600 receive $5,400 more toward their education.)

But the benefit covers only about 60 percent of the average cost of college, according to the College Board's estimates.

And over the last decade, only 52,000 of 641,000 eligible veterans who had signed up for GI Bill tuition benefits from 1985 through 1994, a mere 8 percent, used their full benefit during the 10-year limit following their discharge. An additional 30 percent failed to use it at all, even though their $1,200 buy-in was nonrefundable. By not cashing in on what they had paid for, this group of veterans contributed $230-million to the U.S. Treasury.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, an average of 78 percent of active-duty troops signed up for GI Bill tuition benefits between 1985 and 1994, and the percentage rose steadily over that 10-year period, from 70 percent in 1987 to 91.6 percent in 1994. Soldiers who enlisted after 1994 have not yet reached the deadline to use their benefits, but enrollment percentages in the GI Bill program in the last 10 years have remained high: An average of 93 percent to 95 percent have invested in the program each year from 1995 to 2004.

VA officials argue that those numbers show that the vast majority, or 70 percent, use some portion of the benefit. But critics of the GI Bill, including many veterans, say it does not come close to meeting the financial needs of the modern soldier, and the benefits are often difficult to obtain. Skyrocketing tuition and troops that are more likely than ever before to be married with children add to the financial burden most veterans face in earning a degree, and have even compelled members of Congress to push for stronger benefits.

"It's inadequate, and well short of what is needed to pay for the cost of education at a state institution," says Steve Robertson, legislative-affairs director for the American Legion. "If it were a benefit that would allow them to make ends meet, I think a lot more service men and women would get out and go to college."

Paying More or Less Than Before?

In March Rep. Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, proposed a "Welcome Home Package" in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the $1,200 required to buy in to the GI Bill and increase the total education benefit for veterans on the GI Bill to $75,000.

"They shouldn't have to pay in to receive the benefit, because they have already made a contribution -- it's called their service to this country," says Representative Emanuel. "They and their families have given a tremendous amount, and we're saying $75,000 because it reflects the true costs of a college education."

Critics of the bill and similar proposals say that $75,000 is beyond what Congress can afford, but according to Representative Emanuel, the country has a special obligation to veterans because "one of the things they try to floor you with when you enlist is great benefits. It's part of the marketing pitch."

Representative Emanuel wants to change the rules so that National Guard and reserve troops will receive as much as active-duty personnel. The Welcome Home Package would also deal with secondary costs that students and other veterans incur, by providing health-care benefits to veterans and their families for up to five years after they are discharged, and giving them a $5,000 tax-free contribution for a down payment on a home. His bill already has 20 co-sponsors in the House, and Richard J. Durbin, the minority whip in the Senate, has signed on to co-sponsor the bill.

Other measures in Congress seek to ease the escalating costs of college for veterans, including a bill to increase veterans' eligibility for federally financed student loans. Now the eligibility criteria for Perkins and unsubsidized Stafford Loans count GI Bill benefits as a "financial resource," causing what some argue is a double "tax" on a veteran's $1,200 payment into the GI Bill.

The original GI Bill of 1944 was intended to prevent mass unemployment among returning veterans after World War II by providing them with education benefits, unemployment checks, and home-loan guarantees. Tuition, books, and fees were fully covered at any college or job-training program, public or private, in the United States. In contrast, the current GI Bill covers what the Department of Veterans Affairs estimates to be 70 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public institution.

According to College Board calculations for the 2004-5 academic year, the current annual benefit of $9,036 covers about 60 percent of the average $14,640 for tuition, books, fees, and living expenses at a four-year public residential college.

Student veterans say even that estimate is generous based on their experiences. Jeff Memmer, a 28-year-old Navy veteran, served as a nuclear propulsion plant operator on a fast-attack submarine from 1996 to 2002, including two deployments in the Persian Gulf. Mr. Memmer began planning how to pay for college three years before he started his undergraduate work toward a business degree at Indiana University at Bloomington in December 2002, but the escalating expenses still surprised him.

"When I started putting a plan together in 1999, the benefit would have covered two-thirds of my tuition and costs," says Mr. Memmer. "By the time I got to college, the tuition had increased so much it only covered half, and by the time I graduated it was only covering a third of my expenses."

Although he worked part time as a bartender on weekends, Mr. Memmer still had to take out about $30,000 in loans before he completed his degree in December 2004 by taking a heavy course load each semester and classes during the summer.

Mr. Memmer says one of the biggest problems with the GI Bill is that it underestimates expenses incurred on top of tuition. Books alone cost him $800 per semester, well beyond the $700 GI Bill book budget for an entire academic year. He also had a $500 business-school fee, a $200 telecommunications school fee, and student-activity fees, not to mention health insurance. That disparity sent him on a lot of last-minute trips to the university's financial-aid office for emergency loans.

He also discovered that trying to get his benefits processed by the VA was often a challenge. The lack of guidance he received from his college compelled him to start the Military Veteran Student Society at Indiana to address that problem. Soon after the group's Web page went online, phone calls and e-mail messages came pouring in from across the country from students at other institutions who needed help figuring out their benefits.

"I saw so many veterans fresh from the gulf who couldn't figure out their GI benefits and would be paying for school upfront in cash," says Mr. Memmer. "Then they would end up quitting a semester later and never come back."

Any college that receives money from a student's GI Bill benefits is required to have a designated staff member to help veterans process claims. But more often than not, that responsibility falls on the shoulders of someone who already has a full-time job at the institution doing something else. As a result, benefits-claims officers often do not know enough about the GI Bill to provide any real help to the students, which is why their representative organization, the National Association of Veterans' Program Administrators, lobbied Congress in March for more money. Federal financing for veterans-program administrators has stayed constant since 1976, at $7 per veteran per year, or $11 per veteran when students request that their claims be processed before the academic year begins.

"If the dollar compensation amount were large enough to pay for even a part-time person, that person would be much more qualified" to help the student veteran, says Lester A. Bakke, an officer of the association and a benefits-claims processor for more than 20 years at Minnesota State University at Moorhead, where he also holds a full-time position as director of information technology.

'Life Just Gets in the Way'

Even when GI Bill benefits are processed smoothly, the financial and time demands of family life that many veterans face can prove daunting. After the military became an all volunteer force in 1973, the demographics of personnel changed dramatically. Enlisted men and women are now much more likely to have family obligations than their civilian counterparts, with 58.3 percent of troops married in 2003, compared with 40 percent in 1973, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center, a federal organization that tracks statistics on military personnel.

"The youngest of them are coming out at 25, and it's damn hard to finish college even if you have that $1,000 check coming in" from the GI Bill, says Steve F. Kime, who served for 16 years as president of Service Member Opportunity Colleges, a consortium of more than 1,800 colleges that provide educational opportunities to soldiers and veterans. "The poverty level is $20,000 in this country, and with them not getting even that, it's no wonder we don't have a lot of them completing college."

Before 1977, the bill's educational benefit gave additional money to veterans with spouses and children, but now it does not include any allowance for those factors, unless a veteran is severely disabled.

Mr. Worley, the disabled gulf-war veteran with four daughters, does receive an additional $2,900 a year to support his family -- on top of $2,100 he receives that covers the full cost of tuition and books at his college -- but those benefits come from the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Services program, not the GI Bill. The $2,900 allowance is hardly enough to cover his family's expenses, even with his wife working full time, he says.

Technically, Mr. Worley should still be eligible for his GI Bill benefits on top of the other money because Veterans Affairs makes an exception to the 10-year deadline for disabled veterans. But another battle of paperwork with the department is more than he can handle.

"It would probably take them about three years to process the claim," says Mr. Worley. "I just can't fight them anymore."

He says he spent 12 years filling out forms and seeing doctors before the Department of Veterans Affairs approved his health-benefits claims for chronic fatigue syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a host of other symptoms related to gulf-war syndrome. Despite his continuing illnesses, he keeps a long and regimented schedule: At 7:30 a.m., he drives his four daughters to school, then goes to classes himself until noon, goes to his part-time clerical job, picks the girls up from school at 3:30, drives them back and forth to various sports practices, cooks dinner for the family, and begins studying around 8 or 9 p.m. His wife works 12-hour days as a monument engraver, leaving the house at 7 a.m. and usually returning at about 7 in the evening.

He is taking a full-time course load of 16 credit hours and has maintained a 3.75 grade-point average, but says that with life's other demands and his chronic fatigue syndrome, he will not be able to take as many hours next semester. That will cost him: Although he is classified as 90-percent disabled by the VA, there is a 36-month time limit on his disability education benefits. At his current pace, he will be four months and 13 days behind schedule for completing his degree, and will have to figure out how to pay for the rest of his education.

"I'll just have to find a way," says Mr. Worley. "I'm determined to finish."

Mr. Robertson, with the American Legion, admits that he told his own son, who went to college in Texas as a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, to "stay single while you get your education" because he knows how difficult it can be for military families to support themselves while in college. By the same token, however, he thinks the military should do more to help veterans attend college even if they do decide to get married and have children before earning their degrees.

"For most veterans, their first priority is to provide for their family, so they tend to go as part-time students," says Mr. Robertson. "We think the GI Bill should be adequate enough to give their families health benefits, and allow them to go as full-time students, because their benefit is reduced drastically if they go part time, and they should not be penalized just because they have a family."

'Only a Snapshot'

There are almost as many different permutations of service and benefits in the military as there are enlisted men and women. For some veterans, distance-education opportunities and classes offered on military bases provide the perfect opportunity to work toward a degree while earning a full-time military salary. The Reserve Officer Training Corps, the Army College Fund, and other military education benefits also offer much better tuition compensation than active-duty GI Bill benefits, and more important, they often pay for a soldier's tuition before he begins his military service.

In the standard active-duty enlistment, however, at least two years pass between the time a soldier enlists and the time he or she can begin to use the GI Bill education benefit. An 18-year-old recruit may not have a comprehensive understanding of the full costs of attending college.

"Students hear the amount, and it's a big number, and they can't imagine that it wouldn't pay the full amount," says Phillip Gainous, principal of Montgomery Blair High School, in Silver Spring, Md., where the percentage of students who enlist in the armed services right after high school is 1.5 times as high as the county average. "Their mindset is that it's nothing to worry about, that they'll have it covered by the time college comes around."

Steve Robinson knows that does not always happen. "Maybe it's my own stupidity or I was too young at the time to forecast what my economic conditions would be," says Mr. Robinson, a 42-year-old veteran of the gulf war who has not completed his degree and now serves as the director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a Washington-based advocacy group for veterans. "Those factors were never discussed with me in the military, and while college looked like a good idea at the time, the reality is I can't do it now," with a mortgage, a family, and other obligations.

Although the VA doled out $1.6-billion in education benefits to Montgomery GI Bill beneficiaries in 2004, the organization does not keep track of veterans' graduation and completion rates for any postsecondary courses of study. It has no way of knowing how many people earn degrees, like Mr. Memmer, or have to drop out because of expenses, like Mr. Robinson. And they say they do not have the resources to track how many people are like Mr. Worley, struggling to get by on the current level of benefits.

VA officials say they would like to have a better understanding of how the benefits are used and why, and other federal agencies, like the Office of Management and Budget, are pressuring them to pay more attention to success rates as well.

The statistic of 8 percent who use their full benefit is "only a snapshot, and there are many people who are successful without graduating from college," says Dennis B. Douglass, deputy director of education services at the Department of Veterans Affairs. "If I were to judge by the number of complaint letters we get, I would say it's not a big problem, although it probably is a big problem for those who don't get to use it."

He points out that the escalating costs of health benefits and the many other services the VA provides are already stretching their budget to the breaking point. But Mr. Douglass agrees that there is room for improvement. And he recognizes that most critics of the GI Bill, like Mr. Kime, think the country owes veterans more than they currently get.

"When you sign up to serve your country, you cut a deal with your country and your government that says, I'll defend you in turn for a leg up at college," says Mr. Kime, who also served as the chairman of the Veterans Advisory Committee on Education to the VA. "The veteran has earned this over and above all other entitlements, and the benchmark we should shoot for is 100 percent of the cost."