At Michigan, Integrated Planning Ferries Student Veterans Through Launch of new GI Bill

At the University of Michigan, top administrators did some environmental scanning and spotted the potential for major problems in implementing the new GI Bill for veterans. So they engaged in cross-departmental, integrated planning and pulled off a very successful program:

“I knew we would rise to the occasion,” says Lester Monts, senior vice provost for academic affairs. “Our student veterans earned these benefits, and university staff make sure our students are the priority.”

Initial notification of the new benefits program arrived from the Department of Veterans Affairs in January 2009. Students could begin to apply in May; but the VA’s procedural details were not available until June.

“We could see the potential for a serious logjam,” said Assistant University Registrar Christine Bedz. “With so little lead time, we were concerned about the adverse impact on our students if VA disbursements were delayed. We were determined to make our students’ experience seamless.”

With full appreciation of the operational complexity of the emerging program — including the related Yellow Ribbon tuition supplement, www.ur.umich.edu/0809/Jul27_09/17.php — staff from the Registrar, ONSP, Information and Technology Services, the offices of financial aid, student financial services and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business mapped out what they thought the new system would require.

They hit the bull’s-eye, producing a new process that provided common rules and procedures and, ultimately, a safe harbor for U-M’s student veterans.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Today's GI Bill: Connecting America's Veterans to Higher Education

Now SCUPers can connect on Facebook and on LinkedIn.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday, November 11, is Veterans Day. Take a moment to let someone you know who has served that you appreciate their service.

The American Council in Education (ACE) has just launched a new website to assist veterans in navigating their choices and making the most of their opportunities: "Service members and veterans deserve access to high-quality, postsecondary education. It eases the transition into civilian life and ensures lifelong economic and social benefits. Today’s GI Bill is designed to help you make the most of your education benefits by providing clear yet comprehensive guidance."

Establishing a Veteran-Friendly Campus

This brief article from Business Officer+ is a mini-case study about Youngstown State University, which established a formal Office of Veterans' Affairs aimed at recruitment of veterans who have the new GI Bill:

The challenge in recruiting veterans is that they are not gathered in great numbers in one place as are high school students, office professionals, or displaced workers seeking to retrain. What veterans do have, however, is a strong word-of-mouth network and family connections looking out for them. These realities are the basis for YSU's recruiting strategies.

Saluting a New Cadre of Students

We've been following the development of the new GI Bill for some time now. This article from Business Officer magazine reports on a summit held by the American Council on Education (ACE) for senior campus officials coping with making the most of this funding for our veterans: 

Summit participants presented innovative programs, promising practices, and creative solutions to educational roadblocks for veterans. And while the specifics of their activities varied, at a minimum, higher education institutions that succeed in attracting and retaining veterans provide greater access to accurate and timely information, a streamlined process for accessing education benefits, academic credit for military training and experience, and veteran-specific transitional support programs on campus. In essence, they have changed their culture to accommodate a new phenomenon.

From statewide systems to a small community college, from an institution with a long association with the military to one with a famous history of war protests, here are some examples of creative ideas for transitioning veteran students.

Will the Financial Crisis Derail the New GI Bill?

We've been following the new GI Bill with great interest, as it was made into law and as it now gets implemented. Megan Eckstein shares what she has learned about some provisions of the law that make some administrators uneasy about their ability to fully implement it:

Under the program, created through the GI Bill that was signed into law last summer (The Chronicle, September 24, 2008), the federal government will match, dollar for dollar, any financial aid that colleges provide to veterans above the cost of the most-expensive public institution in that college's state. The general provisions of the GI Bill provide military personnel and recent veterans with enough aid to attend the most-expensive public college in the veterans' home states.

Advocates of the new program, known as the "yellow-ribbon program," worry that veterans' ability to afford the colleges of their choice would be limited if many colleges decide they cannot find the money to chip in to cover veterans' education costs.

Before they can decide to what extent they might be able to participate in the program, college administrators are waiting to see details of final regulations, which are expected sometime next month. The institutions are particularly interested in finding out how the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs will determine what the most expensive public institution is in each state and what fees would be counted toward that total.

Maximizing Financial Aid for Veterans

Subtitled, "What administrators can do to help veterans take advantage of education benefits," this article by Haley Chitty is worth sharing widely around campus.

Because of the variety of sources that provide veteran education aid, many veterans don’t take advantage of all possible benefits. Many aren’t aware that specific types of aid are available, and many more have inaccurate assumptions about benefit programs. For example, some veterans don’t apply for federal student aid because they assume that their military educational benefits make them ineligible for federal student aid.

To help veterans navigate the complicated financial aid process, institutions should work to provide a one-stop shop to give veteran students information about all the possible benefits in one location. Providing a one-stop shop requires various offices on campus to work closely together to provide all relevant information in one location. Ideally, the veteran affairs, financial aid, admissions and various academic departments would collaborate to provide aid, admission, academic and living support to veterans to ensure full access and success at the institution.

The Veterans Are Coming, the Veterans Are Coming

The new GI Bill, if the Veteran's Administration can ever figure out how to run it or outsource it in a way that actually makes it happen, figures to be a somewhat transformative factor in many campuses over the next 2 or 3 years, or longer. We're watching its implementation and the related issues closely and enjoyed the advice (mostly for administrators) in this piece from Inside Higher Ed by Edward F. Palm:

Finally, expect veterans to do well. Just as the expectation that someone will behave badly can create a self-fulfilling prophecy, greeting someone with the expectation that he or she will excel can achieve the desired result. That same undergraduate adviser who puzzled me with his patronizing comment about supporting the first G.I. Bill more than redeemed himself later by soliciting my comments in class when we were discussing a story set in a World War II training camp, Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.” I was able to clarify some of the military practices and customs on which the story turns, and my professor stoked my self-confidence by telling the class that “he speaks from an interesting perspective; he was in the military himself.”

Who's Going to Administer the New GI Bill?

Will one of the last gasps of an administration known for outsourcing whatever it can of government be to successfully or unsuccessfully outsource the otherwise promising new GI Bill?

In a phone interview, Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said there are legitimate concerns about the new benefits system being ready by August, given the extreme complexity of the VA’s task. And he said that the agency’s choice of contractor — and that contractor’s ability to deliver — will be a critical factor in whether the VA completes the task and does so on time.

“It’s fundamentally a new program. The VA has not provided payments directly to colleges and universities since World War II,” said Hartle. He added that the switch to making payments directly to colleges is complicated by the fact that a substantial number of vocationally oriented institutions that participate in the GI Bill don’t participate in the federal financial aid program — so it’s not just a matter of adapting current federal systems.

In addition to paying colleges, the VA will continue to make payments directly to veterans for their housing and book stipends. Different payment levels will be calculated for students attending different institutions (the law covers up to the cost of in-state tuition at the most expensive public college in a veteran’s state). And a Yellow Ribbon program for students attending private colleges adds a whole other dimension.

“Colleges and universities are acutely aware that this is a very big, complex program and that the Department of Veterans Affairs is basically starting from scratch in putting it in place,” said Hartle. “I think the VA is doing as much as they can.”

At the same time, he said, “If you weren’t worried about their ability [to put it in place by next August], you wouldn’t be paying attention.”

The Emerging New GI Bill

As more of us realize that it is headed our way, more of us spend time reflecting and planning on what the new GI Bill may mean for our campuses (PDF), as in this article, written before the new bill was passed. One prediction:

The new GI Bill will come with growing pains. The Veterans Administration, no paragon of management in the best of times, will be faced with more complicated benefits to administer. More requirements for colleges to communicate with the VA will surely evolve, as will the need for strengthened veteran services on campus.

$62B Over 10 Years from New GI Bill - This Could be Interesting

Our attention was caught by this last week when Ohio decided to offer in-state tuition to veterans from out of state enrolling at Ohio institutions using the new GI Bill. Elizabeth Redden - who, by the way, will be attending SCUP-43 in Montreal next week representing Inside Higher Ed, has put together this comprehensive piece about what some people and institutions are doing in anticipation of those GI Bill dollars:

Yet, the progress and now passage of the new GI Bill does seem to be generating an uptick of interest in, for instance, setting up one-stop student services shops for veterans, or establishing veterans centers or lounges. A bill introduced in January by Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.) and Rep. Michael Castle (R-Del.) — which, according to Hinojosa’s staff, is included in compromise legislation to renew the Higher Ed Act – would authorize a federal grant program for colleges that set up “model programs to support veteran student success.” Under the terms of the legislation, qualifying colleges would establish a Center of Excellence for Veteran Student Success, develop a veterans support team involving representatives from admissions, registration, financial aid, veterans benefits, academic advising, health, career advising, disabilities and other relevant areas, hire a full- or part-time coordinator, and monitor veteran student enrollment, persistence and completion.