Veterans who used the GI Bill to go to college at some point from 2002 to 2010 appear to have graduated at rates comparable to their nonveteran peers, attended mostly public institutions, and may have taken slightly longer to complete their degrees, according to a new report.
The Million Records Project, a collaboration among Student Veterans of America, the National Student Clearinghouse, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, was released on Monday. It is believed to be the first national analysis of post-9/11-era veterans who used their federal education benefits to enroll in college.
Over all, nearly 52 percent of the 788,915 veterans in the study earned a postsecondary degree. (“Million Records” refers to the number the groups started with; they were able to analyze 788,915.) The graduation rates in the report reflect those veterans who began using their GI Bill benefits between 2002 and 2010 and who completed a degree by June 2013, the most-recent degree information provided to researchers by the National Student Clearinghouse.
Among nonveteran students, by contrast, 54 percent of those entering college for the first time in 2007 earned a degree or certificate within six years, according to a 2013 report from the clearinghouse.
Veterans in the study were not new to higher education: Roughly 40 percent had already earned a degree before using their GI Bill benefits. The report, “A Review of Veteran Achievement in Higher Education,” suggests that most of those degrees were associate degrees earned with Department of Defense tuition assistance while on active duty.
D. Wayne Robinson, president and chief executive of Student Veterans of America, said the findings on veterans’ paths to degrees were “very telling.” In recent years, controversial statistics claiming that the vast majority of veterans dropped out of college within one year of enrolling had put the organization on the defensive.
And as the cost of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, in particular, tops $34-billion in tuition and benefits, veterans-service organizations like Mr. Robinson’s have tried to explain—until now, without much data to make their case—why the sweeping federal education program was a smart “return on investment” for taxpayers and educators.
“The perception was that we were not completing, that we were not persisting,” said Mr. Robinson, a U.S. Army veteran. “Having lived that life myself, in higher education as well as having worn the uniform, I knew that we were. But this report bears that out.”
National Data at Last
The findings have been long awaited. As the number of veterans enrolled in college continues to swell, calls for reliable information about their academic performance have intensified. Until now, no national statistics existed to demonstrate how well, or how poorly, users of the GI Bill fared in their studies.
The analysis provides some guidance. The sample consists of veterans who began using their education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs for the first time during the eight-year period. Recipients of both the Post-9/11 GI Bill, which took effect in 2009, and its predecessor, the Montgomery GI Bill, are included.
Researchers at Student Veterans of America matched data from that time period, obtained from the Department of Veterans Affairs, with records from the National Student Clearinghouse, which provided enrollment and completion information through June 2013.
The analysis yielded a variety of findings on where veterans enroll, what they study, whether they transfer to institutions in other sectors, and whether they graduate.
Veterans in the study were registered for at least one course credit at a postsecondary institution or a program approved by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those institutions included two- and four-year colleges of all kinds: public and private nonprofit colleges, for-profit institutions, online programs, and vocational and on-the-job training programs.
More than three-quarters of the veterans in the analysis enrolled in public institutions, with much smaller shares—11 percent and 10 percent—enrolling in private nonprofit and private for-profit colleges, respectively.
Where veterans first enrolled appeared to have an influence on whether they went on to earn a degree within the time frame studied. The rate was highest among veterans who first enrolled at private nonprofit institutions: 64 percent of those students went on to earn a degree in any sector. Of those who began college at public institutions, slightly more than half—51 percent—earned a degree, regardless of sector. At for-profit institutions, that rate was 45 percent.
The report cautioned that results for the for-profit sector may have a greater margin of error because a smaller proportion of for-profit colleges shared institutional records with the National Student Clearinghouse than did institutions in other sectors.
The findings also suggest that veterans may need a bit more time to earn their degrees. On average, veterans who first pursued an associate degree took slightly more than five years to complete it. For those working on a bachelor’s degree, it took just over six years.
Relief, Followed by Questions
Those who work with veterans welcomed the data.
“If you had asked me to predict what the findings would be, I would have been unable to do it,” said Shelley M. MacDermid Wadsworth, director of the Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University. “I’m pleased to see that these students seem to be doing about as well as or similar to other students. So in a way it’s not a surprise—perhaps ‘relief’ is a better term.”
Yet while the new report includes hundreds of thousands of veterans who used the Post-9/11 GI Bill from 2009 to 2010, the cutoff for the analysis occurred just as the generous education benefit, which took effect in 2009, was shifting into high gear: In the 2010 fiscal year about 365,000 veterans were using or had used the new GI Bill, but by the end of 2013 the number had topped one million. The consensus among researchers and advocates is that the best data on the impact of the Post-9/11 GI Bill are still a year or two away.
The report acknowledges that limitation and speculates that the 52-percent graduation rate will rise as more veterans have time to finish their degrees.
Ms. Wadsworth, who is also a professor of human development and family studies at Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences, said she was also intrigued by the differences in degree attainment among the various branches of the armed services. Air Force veterans earned degrees at the highest rate—67 percent—followed by the Coast Guard (54 percent), Navy (52 percent), Army (47 percent), and Marine Corps (45 percent).
She wondered: What are the connections between the jobs that service members hold while on active duty, the types of colleges they enroll in, and, ultimately, the civilian jobs they land? Do some military jobs, she speculated, provide a “straighter pipeline” into the civilian work force?
More broadly, the new research could offer tips to colleges as they continue to evaluate how their policies might affect veterans, Ms. Wadsworth said. The findings suggest that veterans “get through in pretty high numbers, but it may take them a while,” she said. So colleges might ask themselves: Are these students “taking longer because they got deployed?” she said. “Or are they taking longer because the institution is making it unnecessarily hard for them to get back into school after they get deployed?”
The analysis did not include whether student veterans had attended college part time or full time, which researchers said would have helped them understand whether a longer-than-average path to a degree had stemmed from deployments, part-time status, or some combination of both. (The 2013 research from the National Student Clearinghouse, for instance, found that only 22 percent of students who attended exclusively part time earned credentials within six years, compared with 76 percent of those enrolled full time.)
The many unanswered questions are what makes Ms. Wadsworth hungry for more data. “The Post-9/11 GI Bill is still pretty new,” she said. “It’s still an unfinished story.”
Correction (4/16/2014, 12:22 p.m.): This article originally misstated the cost so far of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in tuition and benefits. It is $34-billion, not $34-million. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
