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

Financial Aid Strategies in Tough Economic Times

SCUP–45 offers CPEs for CPAs.

Subtitled "10 critical do's and don'ts," this University Business magazine article by Kathy Kurz, Jim Scannell, and Mary Piccioli, provide an annotated check list that begins with (1) track key metrics against a same or similar period in the prior two years, goes through (5) keep admissions and financial aid staff on the same page by using net tuition revenue goals as the common denominator, and finishes up with (10) be transfer friendly.

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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."

Re: Work the Forgotten Resource

Here at SCUP, we utilize up to a dozen University of Michigan work-study students at a time, so we know how valuable they can be to an organization. This article, by Kathy Kurz and Jim Scannell, for University Business magazine, examines the value to students of campus-run work programs that are more than just financial aid. If you're ever asked to plan such a program, this would be a valuable resource for you.

"Work: The Forgotten Resource to Maximize Student Opportunities"

http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1284

"Handled thoughtfully and creatively, these jobs can provide benefits that go far beyond the dollars earned. For example, they offer students a chance to connect with people on campus. Retention research conducted at many schools finds the influence of $1,000 of on-campus employment on retention is much larger than an equivalent amount of grant support.

In addition, work opportunities can be educationally purposeful or career related, giving students chances to build skills and “marketability” that can help them gain full-time employment after graduation."

"Some institutions are sweetening merit scholarship offers by tying them to research opportunities or other paid internships. Opportunities to work with a faculty member on a research project as an undergraduate—and perhaps even jointly publish findings—can be very attractive to students thinking about graduate or professional school after they complete their undergraduate degree."

The article includes a variety of information and suggestions for program elements.

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.

Should You be Worried? What Can Your Campus Do?

Robert Shireman, executive director of The Institute for College Access and Success tells us that "there has not been one case of a student or parent who can't get the federal loan they are eligible for." But that doesn't mean there aren't problems to address:

I suggest a different solution to help the dependent students who genuinely need additional loans. College financial aid officials should have access to a substantial, but not unlimited, pot of additional loan funds to allocate to students who face exceptional circumstances as determined by the college. The additional loan funds should be available to colleges that, overall, do a good job of preventing students from having to take out a lot of loans. This approach respects the professional role that financial aid officials play in assessing students’ needs and family situations. It provides them with a tool they can use for those cases, while preventing schools from broadly taking advantage of students and of the federal government.

In the midst of this economic disarray, it would have been reasonable to expect that the student loan system would be in shambles. That is why editors keep assigning reporters to write stories about people who can’t get loans. But the real problem is not a lack of access to student loans. It is much bigger than that. The challenge is to make sure there is an affordable place in college for students from all backgrounds, in the face of growing financial need, increased demand for higher education, and underfunding at the state and federal levels.

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.

What’s a Financial Aid Director to Do?

This article by Doug Ledermen featured in Inside Higher Education discusses the Financial Aid problems that many Financial Aid offices have recently come under fire for. Ledermen brings up many pertinent issues on the topic including how many Financial Aid offices have conflicting compliance troubles.

"Financial aid and lending officials in New York are far from alone in facing potential uncertainty over which requirements to abide by. More than a dozen state attorneys general have adopted their own codes of conduct, and virtually any student loan provider — and any college that enrolls students from New York — is technically covered by the SLATE law.

“If you have 5 or 10 or 15 different standards that institutions are being held to, that enormously complicates their efforts to comply, and results in the possibility of significant confusion,” says Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. “At the end of the day, everybody is further ahead if the standards, rules and procedures are clear and widely understood.” (One university’s recent stab at comparing the differences among the many proposals out there can be found here.)"