To many institutions, veterans seem like ideal students: They’re seen as hardworking and driven, and they bring guaranteed tuition money through federal benefits.
It’s that last fact, many observers say, that has made service members so attractive to for-profit colleges. Federal law requires institutions to draw at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources beyond federal student aid; but education money that veterans qualify for under the Post-9/11 GI Bill count as a separate source, even though the benefit comes with a federal guarantee.
So for-profit institutions have recruited aggressively, and it has worked. Students veterans brought more than $19.5 billion to colleges through the GI Bill from August 2009 to September 2014, and nearly $8 billion of that amount went to for-profit colleges, according to data from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
For nonprofit colleges that see serving veterans as an important part of their mission, that poses a challenge: Getting service members fresh out of the military to enroll is often a matter of getting on their radar, and for-profit institutions tend to do that first. The nature of the "exit moment" — the point at which veterans are instructed about their GI Bill benefits — makes it difficult for traditional colleges to get a head start. But with a large group of veterans now preparing to leave the service, nonprofit colleges are looking to close the gap between that exit moment and enrollment. Here’s how.
A 'Self-Perpetuating Cycle'
Just before they are discharged, veterans get information about all aspects of their benefits, from health care to home loans, during several days of sessions run in part by the Department of Defense and the VA. The sessions are led by fellow service members, and veterans’ advocates say that poses a problem: Those service members aren’t always equipped to teach veterans how to navigate their educational choices.
"It is very much like, ‘Open mouth, turn on a fire hose, and try to remember as much information as you can,’" said Craig J. Bryan, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Utah and the associate director of its National Center for Veterans Studies. The information service members receive "isn’t necessarily the most relevant or most important information they need to find that job or enroll in college classes," he said.
Mr. Bryan called it a "self-perpetuating cycle": Since the service members leading the training sessions may not have gone to college themselves, they can’t function as guidance counselors.
Meanwhile, by the time service members are being told about their GI Bill benefits, many may have already had exposure to for-profit institutions — because the institutions are located near military bases, use aggressive online-recruitment strategies, or run large-scale advertising campaigns that pitch their programs as the cheapest and fastest way to get a degree.
Traditional colleges might wish to close that awareness gap. But they aren’t allowed to send staff members to military bases to court service members, said Steve Borden, director of the Pat Tillman Veterans Center at Arizona State University, who called that restriction a "real and serious" problem.
"The Department of Defense does not have a mechanism by which people outside can reach in and talk to people who are transitioning out," Mr. Borden said.
Lines of Communication
In fact, even that step might come too late. Many service members may already use tuition assistance while they are in the service, often to take classes through for-profit institutions, Mr. Borden said. "You need to get farther in front of it than that and start educating our military members about education when they come into the service."
Mr. Borden made other suggestions to improve service members’ ability to make the most of their benefits. For example, fill the guidance-counselor gap: The Department of Defense, he said, could bring in outside advisers for sessions that would give members of the military the same guidance they would have received from a college counselor in high school.
Veterans should have to complete an online training program about the education aspect of their benefits before committing to a college, he said, though he acknowledged that some military officials may find the requirement "intrusive." Such a program could make it harder for veterans to use their benefits, he said, but it would also make it "harder for them to waste it."
Mr. Borden isn’t the only one suggesting change. Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California and former U.S. secretary of homeland security, has called for a stronger "linkage" between the Department of Education and the VA to make sure veterans get sufficient information about their education benefits and the best ways to use them. She also said the two agencies should team up "to more aggressively go after those institutions that are targeting vets because they are very lucrative."
"I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush," she said in an interview last week. "There are some for-profits that do deliver, but there are others that I think of as bad actors in the sense that students do enroll but don’t graduate."
She said veterans must leave the service knowing how to compare colleges and consider their full range of options — like going to a community college and transferring into a four-year program. In a 2014 letter to the education secretary, Arne Duncan, Ms. Napolitano called for the creation of an "interagency working group" to "increase accountability for the federal student aid" colleges receive and to monitor institutions with low graduation or high default rates.
The group, which would include the VA along with White House, the Departments of Education, Treasury, and Justice, and watchdog groups, would be asked to "explore ways to improve outreach efforts to specific populations, including veterans, to ensure they have relevant information about institutional accountability and how their military and veterans benefits coordinate with student financial aid."
There could be challenges to such a group, starting with the fact that those agencies are often on different pages when it comes to veterans’ issues. Last week, in a new report, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau slammed loan servicers that have preyed on military borrowers — a stance that mirrors the Justice Department’s but contrasts with the Department of Education’s previous ruling that cleared the servicers of wrongdoing.
"You get into the classic, ‘Who has jurisdiction over what?’" Ms. Napolitano said. "But there’s a linkage there that could really help our vets."
Smarter Marketing
In the meantime, the best things traditional colleges can do may be to sharpen their recruiting messages and do right by the veterans who do attend.
Mr. Bryan, the University of Utah professor, said many traditional institutions’ marketing plans miss veterans because they are targeted at traditional freshmen. Institutions tend to advertise "the lifestyle" that comes with a degree, he said, like the residence halls, social aspects of campus life, and opportunities to study abroad.
"Veterans don’t care," he said, because most are focused on graduating quickly and using their benefits efficiently, not on joining clubs or extracurricular activities.
And nonprofit institutions that do try to court service members often get the details wrong. "It’s almost like they don’t know how to talk to veterans," Mr. Bryan said. "They put camo on the website and use a couple buzzwords."
But Mr. Bryan said that colleges are becoming savvier in creating programs to support veterans. For example, staff members in the veterans-services office at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which has about 600 student veterans, follow up before the start of the academic year with students who have checked the military-service box on their applications, said John G. Bechtol, the assistant dean of students.
Then staff members attend 41 summer orientation sessions and meet with veterans at each. "Our goal is to remove their military affiliation as being any kind of burden," Mr. Bechtol said. "So now they just face the normal challenges of being a new student, like, ‘How do I get to class?’"
There are other ways to help ease the academic transition. For five years, the Texas A&M University system, which enrolls more than 11,000 veterans or children of veterans, has counted military experience toward college credits in programs like health, management, and criminal justice, said Rod Davis, director of the system’s veterans-support office.
Efforts like those, which support the veterans already on or heading to their campuses, may ultimately be the best ways to advertise to other prospective veteran students, said Wendy A. Lang, director of Operation College Promise, a program that trains college professionals on how to work with veterans. "I always tell people the best way to attract military-affiliated students is to have happy military-affiliated students at your school," she said.
To do that, several institutions are trying an unconventional approach. For the first time this fall, Cornell University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Smith College, the University of Chicago, Williams College, and Yale University are working with a nonprofit organization, Service to School, that aims to funnel veterans into their programs, said Tim Hsia, Service to School’s co-founder.
Volunteers at Service to School will identify high-achieving veterans who could qualify for the program, called Vetlink. The volunteers, many of whom are also veterans, will introduce candidates to the colleges, guide them through the application process, and help the colleges review applicants, Mr. Hsia said.
Mr. Hsia said volunteers would give tips on writing essays and updating résumés, serving a role similar to that of a high-school guidance counselor.
"Never will we say, ‘We’re going to get you into a top school,’" Mr. Hsia said. "What we can control is effort and making sure your app is great, and if it’s not great, making sure we get it to that level."
Read more at The Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/How-Traditional-Colleges/231665