(NEW YORK) MintPress – When Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (D) introduced the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act in January 2007, he hoped the new benefits would help current veterans as much as the original GI Bill helped the so-called Greatest Generation, a term coined by veteran journalist Tom Brokaw to describe those who fought in World War II and helped establish America as a superpower.
The bill, which went into effect in 2009 and is known as the Post-9/11 GI Bill, expanded the educational support for military veterans who have served since Sept. 11, 2001. Now, it provides full tuition and fees for public school in-state students. For those attending private or foreign schools, it pays tuition and fees up to $18,077 for the 2012 academic year. The bill provides benefits for 15 years following the end of active duty.
But since its enactment, thousands of veterans have filed complaints against for-profit schools, saying they use misleading ads to sell expensive but inadequate education that leave them with few job prospects.
Former Marine Moses Maddox, who took a sales job with the private University of Phoenix while he was attending classes himself, said he was called “an enrollment counselor” but was essentially a telemarketer, calling vets to persuade them to use their GI Bill benefits to enroll.
“We capitalized on people’s fears and lack of knowledge,” he said.
And Maddox found out the hard way that the state university where he wanted to go didn’t accept the nine course credits he’d earned at Phoenix.
“What veterans hear is the aggressive marketing that’s selling a product that isn’t real, and pretty soon their benefits are gone,” said Tom Tarantino, a veteran and GI Bill specialist with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). “These schools spend insane amounts of money on marketing but almost nothing on student services.”
Tarantino revealed that some vets have believed they were earning nursing degrees but actually received a degree in “nursing technology,” which employers didn’t accept, while at least one got a degree in “finance management theory” but couldn’t get the accounting job he thought he would.
“We have millions of federal dollars going into an industry that largely doesn’t have any control, any regulation and has nothing that helps veterans make solid educational decisions,” he asserted.
Gaming the system
“We cannot simply stand by while our servicemembers and veterans are being targeted and aggressively recruited by for-profit colleges just looking to make a quick buck,” said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a military veteran himself who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
For the last two years, his committee has been investigating vets’ complaints, and the results are startling. Among them: For-profit schools account for 13 percent of all college students but receive 38 percent of GI Bill payments and account for 47 percent of all student loan defaults.
In addition, taxpayers paid less than $5,000 a year to educate a vet at a public college and more than $10,000 at a private school. American Public Education and Bridgepoint Education, for instance, earned $133 million and $113 million respectively last year from GI Bill funding compared to $31 and $25 million for the two top public schools, the University of Maryland and the University of Texas systems.
Moreover, for-profit schools spend far more on sales, marketing and advertising than on educational support staff.
“When these for-profits are taking taxpayer funds and attributing 22 percent to marketing, 37 percent to profit, and they have an abysmal 60-70 percent dropout rate, is this a good deal for taxpayers?” questioned U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.).
Cracking down
In March, Sen. Webb introduced the Military Veterans Education and Reform Act requiring schools to disclose graduation rates and default rates to prospective students and the Pentagon to set up a centralized complaint process to address allegations of fraud or abuse.
Another bill introduced in March, the GI Educational Freedom Act, would mandate counseling for veterans who use educational benefits and set up a tracking system to help ensure schools provide quality education.
And in April, President Obama issued an executive order requiring the Department of Veterans Affairs to trademark the term “GI Bill” to prevent schools from using it to imply they are exclusively approved for GI Bill benefits. The order also compels the 6,000 colleges that receive GI Bill funds to offer veterans “Know Before You Owe” literature that reveals what their education will cost.
According to the president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, Steve Gunderson, an industry task force is forming a self-regulating body to conduct its own investigation of the allegations of abuse and to develop standards for educating vets.
“I think we’re reaching an appropriate consensus between our schools, veterans’ service organizations and government agencies,” he said.
The issue is likely to come under further scrutiny during the fierce presidential campaigns.