COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Leaving Military: Veterans
GI Bill falling short of college tuition costs
Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff
February 10, 2008
WASHINGTON - Halsey Bernard made it through a tour in Iraq as amachine gunner. The question for him now is will he make it through
the University of Massachusetts.
It isn't a question of academics for the 24-year-old Boston resident.
It's about money - and about the obligation of a nation to its
fighting men and women. Bernard, who served with the Second Battalion
Eighth Marines in Nasariyah, Iraq, in 2003, is one of thousands of
veterans who have returned from combat service only to find that
their GI Bill college benefits fall far short of actual costs.
"What they tell you on TV and what the recruiters tell you when you
go to sign up is: 'Don't worry. College is taken care of.' And it is
not true," said Bernard. "Today it is a serious financial struggle
and bureaucratic struggle and personal struggle to try to go to
college after serving in combat."
The original GI Bill provided full tuition, housing, and living costs
for some 8 million veterans; for many, it was the engine of
opportunity in the postwar years. But, in the mid 1980s, the program
was scaled back to a peacetime program that pays a flat sum. Today
the most a veteran can receive is approximately $9,600 a year for
four years - no matter what college costs.
Now, five years into the Iraq conflict, a movement is gathering steam
in Washington to boost the payout of the GI Bill, to provide a true
war-time benefit for war- time service. But the effort has run
headlong into another reality of an unpopular war: the struggle to
sustain an all-volunteer force.
The Pentagon and White House have so far resisted a new GI Bill out
of fear that too many will use it - choosing to shed the uniform in
favor of school and civilian life.
"The incentive to serve and leave," said Robert Clarke, assistant
director of accessions policy at the Department of Defense, may
"outweigh the incentive to have them stay."
Such administration objections infuriate the lead advocate in
Congress for upgrading GI Bill benefits, US Senator James Webb,
Democrat of Virginia. Webb, a Vietnam veteran and the only serving
senator with a son who has seen combat in Iraq, said he simply can't
understand why veterans struggling to pay for higher education is not
on the nation's political radar screen, particularly in the
presidential primary season when the war and the economy are both at
the center of the debate.
"I worry about this and what it says about our nation's view of the
value of service," Webb said. "We hear from those opposed that it is
too expensive and it's too complicated. Excuse me? In 1946, they
worked out how to provide for veterans on the back of a memo pad with
a stubby pencil. . . . We are five years into the war in Iraq, we
need to get this done."
Webb's bill, which has drawn 31 cosponsors but no Senate action since
he filed it a year ago, would cover the full cost of attending state
university for in-state residents as well as a stipend for living
expenses. It is projected to cost about $2.5 billion per year.
The benefit is capped at the cost of the most expensive public state
college or university in any given state. In Massachusetts that would
be UMass-Amherst, where total student costs for a year - tuition,
fees, room, board, and books - run over $20,000.
Reservists - who now get a fraction of the benefit available to
active-duty troops, controversial in a war that leans heavily on
reserve forces - would also gain from Webb's plan. Under a draft of
his bill, all operational troops who served at least two years of
active duty would receive the same benefit.
Massachusetts already offers more higher education help to veterans
than other states, an $800 annual stipend on top of GI Bill benefits.
That has enabled Bernard to hang on financially at UMass-Boston. If
the Webb bill were to pass, Bernard's full costs at the university
would be comfortably covered, and he could focus on his studies
without having to worry every week about making ends meet.
Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war veteran and director of the Iraq and
Afghanistan Veterans of America, an organization based in New York,
said that enhancing the GI Bill is a solid investment in the
country's future. One study he cites suggests that every dollar spent
on the original GI Bill created a seven-fold return for the economy.
"Funding the GI Bill as Senator Webb proposes it for one year would
cost this country what it spends in Iraq in 36 hours," he said.
Cause of frustration
That promise of an education in return for serving the country is one
of the most frequently cited reasons that young men and women join
the military, and it is plastered all over recruitment banners and
television advertisements.
The limited return on the promise is one of the most common sources
of bitterness and frustration that emerge in interviews with Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans.
They are people like Liam Madden, a 23-year-old who served with the
31st Marine Expeditionary Unit in Anbar Province in 2004 and 2005 and
now attends Northeastern University. "They dangle the promise of
education before you when you are recruited, but then they flip it
around when they don't want you to leave and warn you that it will
only cover a community college and you are better off staying in the military."
Madden, who hails from a pocket of rural poverty in Vermont, said he
is barely able to make his tuition payments at Northeastern and has
gotten by in part through paid speaking engagements for the
small-but-growing organization known as Iraq Veterans Against the War.
Beyond the financial struggle is a daunting bureaucratic obstacle
course that can confound veterans and sometimes steer them away from
the benefit altogether. That struggle starts with the requirement
that all participants buy into the program with a $1,200 upfront payment.
William Bardenwerper, an Army veteran of Iraq with an undergraduate
degree from Princeton University, described a six-month odyssey of
paperwork in trying to navigate the current GI Bill. He kept a
detailed log of his frustrating, and to-date fruitless, effort to
access his benefits for graduate school.
"Not to sound elitist," said Bardenwerper, "but if a 31-year-old
Princeton grad has a hard time deciphering what he is entitled to,
then I have no idea how a 21-year-old armed only with a GED could
navigate this system."
Signs of progress
There have been, in recent weeks, some signs that the political
logjam blocking Webb's bill may be easing. He has picked up new
cosponsors, though there are still only three Republicans among them,
including the two senators from Maine. And the Bush administration
has hinted at a desire for compromise on the issue. In his State of
the Union speech last month, the president spoke of one relatively
small shift - making unused GI Bill benefits available to spouses and
families of veterans.
But there are few if any indications of a breakthrough. Meanwhile,
some private efforts are underway to try to fill the gap for veterans.
One key player is James Wright, president of Dartmouth College, who
believes the current GI Bill is outdated and an insult to combat
veterans. A Korean War veteran from a working-class background who
tapped the GI Bill to launch his academic career, Wright has helped
begin a privately funded program in coordination with the American
Council on Education to offer college counseling to veterans and help
them find financial aid to supplement the GI Bill.
Efforts by Wright, other academic institutions, and individual
philanthropists, such as billionaire financier Jerome Kohlberg, who
last year announced a $4 million scholarship fund for veterans, are
helping a few soldier-scholars. But only a few.
"There's a moral imperative for us to provide for veterans, and there
is a practical benefit to educating these men and women who have
served their country," said Wright, who last week announced that he
will step down at Dartmouth but plans to continue his advocacy for
GIs and an enhanced GI Bill. "For us to be failing to live up to that
responsibility is unconscionable. "
Webb believes such efforts, as noble as they are, do not relieve the
federal government of its obligation to provide an opportunity for
higher education to those who serve the country.
But Pentagon officials say the risk that an expanded benefit could
cut into reenlistment rates is real. Clarke, of the Department of
Defense, said it is simply off-base to compare what was offered to
World War II veterans to the situation today. There was no concern
about retention rates back then, he said; rapid demobilization was
the order of the day.
And Clarke said he doubts reports that military recruiters are
painting an overly rosy picture of education benefits. "I think
recruiters are always going to play up the best case, but I don't
think they are going to take that past what is the truth."
Whatever compromise emerges in Washington - if any does - it will do
little for veterans like Todd Bowers, 28, who dreamed of attending an
elite private college after returning, after being shot in the face,
from his second combat tour.
Severely wounded but also incredibly lucky, he recovered well.
Ambitious, he enrolled at George Washington University - transferring
from the community college in Arizona he had attended before his first tour.
But George Washington is one of the nation's most costly colleges,
with total expenses running over $55,000 a year. His GI Bill benefit
as a Marine reservist would cover only a small fraction of that, and
his savings - all $18,000 he had earned while overseas - and loans
couldn't close the gap.
The military sent him his Purple Heart in the mail but told him there
was nothing else they could do to help him pay for college. The
financial stress, on top of his war trauma symptoms - insomnia,
nightmares, memory loss - was too much. In the end, he dropped out.
Today, Bowers spends his time roaming through the Capitol as a
lobbyist on veterans issues for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of
America, pressing the case for Webb's bill.
"You end up feeling that the military thinks that all you deserve is
a community college. It's pretty disgraceful. I think I can do
better, and I think anyone who served the country in combat deserves
better," he said.
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