Now that more than 760,000 military veterans have made use of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, a key question has emerged: What’s the best way to measure the program’s effectiveness?
Taxpayers have shelled out billions of dollars so far to finance the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which is designed to allow veterans to go to college full time with their living expenses covered. By the end of the program’s 15-year life span, that price tag is expected to top $90-billion. But identifying the appropriate metrics for determining the GI Bill’s success—retention rates? graduation rates? job-placement rates?—has continued to vex educators, advocates for veterans, and federal officials alike.
At a panel discussion here on Tuesday sponsored by Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families, several representatives of higher education, government, and the private sector shared ideas about the GI Bill’s future. Part of the challenge in gauging its effects so far, some said, is that existing tools to measure graduation rates are incomplete and ill suited for tracking the veteran population.
The event, titled “Empowering the Next Greatest Generation: Considering the Promise of the Post-9/11 GI Bill,” included remarks from James Wright, the former president of Dartmouth College and a Marine veteran; Megan Mitcham, director of veterans programs at the American Council on Education; Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America; and Curtis L. Coy, deputy under secretary for economic opportunity at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Little precedent exists for measuring veterans’ success in college, said Mr. Coy, of the VA. For the seven decades that military veterans have used different versions of the GI Bill to attend college, the federal government has never tracked their graduation rates. Even for the largest cohort of veterans ever to use the federal program—the several million veterans of World War II who went to college or vocational school on the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, as the groundbreaking law is formally known—no reliable graduation rates exist, he said.
A Study of Performance
For the latest generation of student veterans, at least, that is about to change. In April, President Obama signed an executive order directing the VA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education to start tracking graduation rates of veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
The VA is now gathering that information, Mr. Coy said. But he could not say how soon the data would be available. So far, the only graduation rates the agency will reveal are from institutions that have voluntarily reported such figures. Those statistics show that more than 62,000 veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill have graduated from about 2,000 institutions, Mr. Coy said. But, he added, those numbers are “practically meaningless” because they reflect only a fraction of the 6,000 institutions nationally where veterans have enrolled on the GI Bill since the program took effect, in 2009.
Mr. Dakduk, of Student Veterans of America, said the absence of comprehensive hard data has fueled speculation about how veterans fare in college. He thinks some of that guesswork is flawed. In July, NBCnews.com published a controversial report stating that 88 percent of veterans drop out of college within the first year of enrolling and only 3 percent graduate. That report, which went viral among veterans, cited data from a work-force-development council in Colorado that many officials and advocates have since questioned. Mr. Dakduk called the 88-percent dropout rate “preposterous.”
Last year Operation College Promise and the Pat Tillman Foundation published a pilot study of veterans’ academic performance at seven institutions with large veteran populations. The initial findings showed that veterans tend to outperform their nonveteran peers. They also had higher retention rates than did nonveteran students. The study is being expanded this year. But broader patterns on the retention of veterans have been elusive: Early results from a recent survey of 275 institutions found that more than two-thirds do not track retention or completion rates for their undergraduate veterans.
A new metric for gauging veterans’ success in college would be an improvement over existing college-completion measurements, which include only first-time, full-time students, Mr. Dakduk and others said. Veterans who begin their college education part time—while still on active duty, for instance—would not be captured in the current statistics.
Mr. Dakduk said Student Veterans of America was trying to broker a partnership between the VA and the National Student Clearinghouse to track graduation rates of veterans.
“We want to know,” Mr. Dakduk said, “what the return on investment of the Post-9/11 GI Bill is.”
