Tracking GI Bill's success

Last of six parts.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill has paid for nearly one million veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to go to school at a cost about $30 billion since 2009, but the federal government has yet to document how many of those students graduated, much less whether they stayed in school.

Neither the Department of Veterans Affairs nor other agencies maintain data that track retention and graduation rates among students under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Without that information, some worry those benefits could be in danger.

"We need to track these numbers to defend the Post-9/11 GI Bill," said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a Washington-based organization. "It's an investment into our military. It's an investment into our country."

Every previous version of the GI Bill has faced elimination or reduction, Dakduk said. The World War II GI Bill expired after 12 years, and educational benefits during the Korean and Vietnam War eras were reduced as those conflicts ended.

"History proves to me that it's a very, very real threat," Dakduk said. "This is a benefit that could definitely be scaled back as involvement winds down overseas - unless we can prove a return on investment."

The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008, designed to provide an education to those who served after Sept. 10, 2001, approves benefits for use toward graduate and undergraduate degrees as well as technical training, which includes everything from nursing and management to truck driving and acupuncture.

Benefits have been disbursed to public and private nonprofit schools, as well as to for-profit universities and institutes, which collected more than $639 million by July 2010.

Spending on the Post-9/11 GI Bill is estimated to hit $42 billion next year, according to VA and White House projections.

The VA has not released a 2011 breakdown of payments to individual schools because of inaccurate entries into its system, VA spokesman Randal Noller said in an e-mail. The VA did release the number of veterans trained at each school through January 2013, but that list includes duplication among students who transfer schools. The department also released a report of funding to each county under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, but not total benefits paid to each school.

VA officials replied to auditors in a May 2013 Government Accountability Office report that the primary VA job is to provide benefits, "not to be responsible for veterans' individual academic performance or goals."

The GAO report, however, called it "critical" for the VA "to not only collect outcome data, but also plan how it will use such data to improve management of its education benefits performance."

Without that, auditors concluded, it's difficult for the VA to help students and "inform policymakers about the value veterans are receiving for the government's substantial investment."

Student Veterans of America is pursuing a more proactive role. In January, the organization announced it would collect college graduation rates for veterans. Joining the VA and the National Student Clearinghouse, SVA hopes the information will show veteran outcomes on campus.

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a Vietnam veteran and former secretary of the Navy, proposed the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2007 as an updated version of the 1944 GI Bill, which educated 7.8 million World War II veterans.

In the first year of benefits payments, from August 2009 to July 2010, 1,968 public schools took in more than $696 million to educate 203,790 veterans, with spending averaging about $3,418 a student, according to VA data.

Private schools, New York University and George Washington University among them, received $416 million for teaching 49,470 veterans, about $8,409 a student.

For-profit schools collected nearly as much funding as public institutions, more than $639 million, for 76,746 veterans, or an average of $8,337 for each student.

The U.S. Department of Education has suggested a system to track student veterans and active service members while they attend higher-education institutions. The proposed system would track the number of Post-9/11 GI Bill beneficiaries and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance recipients, as well as how much money each school receives. The system would be in place for the 2014-15 school year and collect data from the previous school year. The department did not have a deadline for approval.

Michael Green, a Marine Corps veteran studying at the for-profit University of Phoenix's Murrieta, Calif., campus, chose the school because of its flexible schedule, he said. Green works on an accelerated pace that traditional universities don't offer, taking classes in five-week sessions instead of the typical 16-week semester.

Green, who served three tours in Iraq before leaving in June 2012, balances a seasonal job as a high school football coach with night classes toward his business-management degree. He said the Phoenix schedule works for veterans and other nontraditional students.

"We got stay-at-home moms and guys who are working 40, 60 hours a week," he said. "The classes are convenient, the homework is challenging. In my eyes it is a good university."

Before joining the Marines, Nick Lanteri attended Fitchburg (Mass.) State College, where he had fun, he said, and didn't care about accomplishing anything.

After returning home from two tours in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury, Lanteri said, he didn't take online courses because he couldn't focus on them.

"I just can't sit in front of a computer that long. I can't," he said. "And for me, a lot of the stuff - even in classes now - a lot of stuff, they'll explain it, but I kind of need that face-to-face explanation."

Now a criminal-justice major at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Lanteri said he was more focused on finishing his degree.

"Because it's hard for me to be in those large classrooms and in those large groups of people," he said, "school for me, now, is a goal to get accomplished. It's like an obstacle I need to conquer."

With student veterans such as Lanteri, who has attended multiple schools, the population proves to be a difficult group to track.

Most surveys of graduation rates count only first-time college students, or those who enter degree programs without any previous college credits. That means veterans who started degrees before their enlistment or took classes while still in the military aren't counted.

Some veterans enroll part time and take longer to finish their degrees, so they can't be tracked by traditional four-year graduation rates.

Corwin Cherry, who served in Iraq in 2003, enrolled in what then was Pensacola (Fla.) Junior College after he left the military in 2005.

Cherry, 34, has PTSD and said the chaotic nature of the classroom could trigger panic attacks and headaches.

"You don't like crowds. You don't like a lot of stuff going on at the same time," he said. "So when you're in a little, small classroom with a lot of people you don't know, you just can't stay focused on it."

After failing several classes, Cherry switched to Kaplan University, a private for-profit school that allows him to take all his courses online.

Taking classes at home, in a quiet environment he's comfortable in, Cherry plans to graduate with a degree in alternative medicine in 2017, he said.

The Post-9/11 GI Bill provides for 36 months, about four academic years, of benefits.

For veterans attending a public school in a state where they have residency, benefits cover full tuition. For veterans enrolled at a public school outside of their home state, the GI Bill covers up to the cost of the most expensive undergraduate public tuition in that state, leaving the student to pay the difference.

At private and for-profit schools, benefits cover up to $18,077.50 an academic year.

"There's never been a more generous GI Bill," said Rod Davis, director of the Texas A&M University System Veterans Support Office. "We're in better shape than we've ever been before."

In addition to tuition benefits, students receive a monthly housing allowance depending on their school's location, from $768 in Alpena, Mich., to $3,257 in New York City. Allowances average between $1,000 and $1,400, while students whose schoolwork is exclusively online get $684 a month, according to the VA.

In 2011, Operation College Promise, a Trenton-based national policy program, began a six-year survey to track about 700 Post-9/11 GI Bill students on 21 campuses nationwide.

The first installment of that survey, which will show retention rates for the 2011-12 academic year, is scheduled to be released this year. Preliminary numbers are promising, said Wendy Lang, executive director of the program, which focuses on the transition of veterans into postsecondary education.

"They're progressing toward a degree just as efficiently, if not more efficiently, than your traditional student," she said.

This report is part of a project on post-9/11 veterans produced by the News21 program involving top college journalism students across the country and based at Arizona State University. It is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corp. For additional stories, photos, and interactive elements - including a look at the money given to veteran service organization charities - go to http://backhome.news21.com.