At the end of eight years in the United States Marine Corps, Paul Szoldra found himself at an impasse. He had just earned an associate degree from the University of Phoenix while stationed in Okinawa, and wanted to use the Post-9/11 GI Bill to go on from there. But when it came to choosing a college, he was stuck.
“I was totally ignorant,” he says. “It was awful.”
Nobody in Mr. Szoldra’s family had gone to college. The sergeant’s head swirled with unknowns: What made one campus different from the next? How did accreditation work? If a college cost more than its competitor down the road, did that mean it was better? What about all the ads and Web sites that turned up on Google, promising “GI Bill-approved schools” and “veteran friendly” institutions?
Mr. Szoldra’s uncertainty about how best to use his federal tuition benefits is all too common. As the Post-9/11 GI Bill nears its fourth year, with more than 550,000 veterans enrolled in thousands of institutions, advocacy groups, lawmakers, and President Obama warn that veterans are vulnerable in a higher-education marketplace eager for their GI Bill dollars—with some purveyors, particularly for-profits, recruiting aggressively. The stakes are high: So far, colleges have collected more than $4.4-billion under the new GI Bill.
But while the government puts money in veterans’ pockets, it doesn’t teach them how to spend it. Many veterans recall a brief presentation about education benefits during the military’s weeklong transition program, which focuses more on how to get care at a VA hospital, write a résumé, and dress for an interview. It does little, they say, to help them choose a college under the most generous GI Bill in six decades.
For guidance, many veterans turn to Google. What they get can be confusing: Universities of all stripes have created pages thanking veterans for their service and touting military-friendly policies. Commercial sites offer to guide veterans to certain colleges. What prospective students won’t find is a way to sift through the crush of information.
The turbulence has not gone unnoticed. President Obama plans to issue today an executive order designed to help servicemen and -women, and veterans, make more-informed educational decisions, and to protect them from “aggressive and deceptive targeting,” according to a statement from the White House. The order matches several provisions in federal legislation introduced this year, directing the creation, for example, of a “centralized complaint system” where students receiving education benefits can report fraud. (See a list of bills.)
The president’s order will also require the Department of Defense to set rules for college representatives’ visits to bases; asks the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Education to share information—such as veterans’ graduation rates and estimated loan debt—with students receiving education benefits; and require colleges to provide academic and financial-aid advising to servicemembers and veterans. It will also, as 14 senators urged in March, direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to register the term “GI Bill.”
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group, lauds the Post-9/11 GI Bill but worries about its integrity. Without proper guidance, the group says, veterans might unwittingly squander their benefits on dead-end degree programs or attend institutions that lack the support services to get them through. Above all, the veterans group is concerned that any perceived abuse in the well-received but costly new GI Bill will lead to cutbacks.
“We have a responsibility, especially when we’re spending billions of taxpayer dollars, to ensure that there is some minimum of quality,” says Tom Tarantino, the group’s deputy policy director. The first 10 years of the Post-9/11 GI Bill will cost taxpayers up to $90-billion, it’s estimated. That’s an investment worth protecting, Mr. Tarantino says: “We’re not going to get any more out of Congress.”
Consumer Education
Finding the right college is hardly intuitive for anybody. But for veterans, the process can be especially difficult. For starters, many say, leaving the military is often frowned upon by those still in uniform, complicating preparations for a transition back to civilian life—including college counseling.
One week before David Friestad separated from the Marines, he paid a visit to the educational-services office on his base, in Twentynine Palms, Calif. His goal was to learn more about the new GI Bill, which he planned to use to attend Arizona State University, near his hometown, Scottsdale.
Mr. Friestad, who is 24, had two prior brushes with college: a semester at Arizona State right after high school, in 2006, and an online course at Grand Canyon University while he was on active duty. The first stint went fine, but he regretted the financial burden on his mother, and he enlisted in the military for the education benefits. The online course was a disaster: Officials at Grand Canyon lost his tuition-assistance voucher, he says, and debt collectors went after his mother and former girlfriend while he was deployed in Afghanistan.
At the education office, Mr. Friestad struck out. There wasn’t time to explain the benefits, an official told him. “I was getting out so soon,” says Mr. Friestad, who served five years, “and they didn’t really know very much, either, about the Post-9/11 GI Bill.”
That’s a common complaint among veterans, says Mr. Szoldra, the former Marine with a degree from Phoenix. “There’s a bit of a stigma if you say you’re getting out,” he says. “It’s like you’re on the blacklist: ‘You’re getting out, you’re never going to make it, you’re going to have a horrible time.’”
For some veterans, that perceived dismissiveness is at odds with the previous extensive training. Mr. Szoldra had a year of military training under his belt before deploying to Afghanistan, in 2004. Getting out is another story, he says. “You get about a week to learn whatever it is you’re supposed to do for the rest of your life.”
The military’s Transition Assistance Program, run by the Department of Defense with input from the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Labor, Education, and other federal agencies, is widely criticized for providing inadequate information about choosing a college. Its presentation about veterans’ education benefits is 45 minutes long. But the program, known as TAP, is being revamped, and by the fall will include more-extensive information on both the GI Bill and the transition to college, says Danny G.I. Pummill, director of the Veterans Benefits Administration Department of Defense Program Office.
In the meantime, veterans say, the go-to sources of legitimate information are the Department of Veterans Affairs Web site and one maintained by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. But those services, veterans add, are no match for marketing.
Attractive Targets?
A simple Google search unleashes a barrage of marketing materials from colleges of all kinds. There are rankings. “Best of” lists. Advice forums. Patriotic images of men and women in uniform—and in caps and gowns.
“GI Bill Benefits can help you achieve your educational goals, no matter what they may be,” proclaims GIDegrees.com, which displays the logos of five for-profit colleges as “featured schools.” Several sites offer guides to “VA-approved” colleges. But before veterans can browse, they must submit their names, phone numbers, military affiliations, and academic interests. Then a list of institutions appears; they are often for-profit colleges. A phone call from one or more of the colleges’ call centers comes in a matter of minutes.
Marketing is particularly robust in the for-profit sector, and not just to veterans. A recent analysis by the U.S. Senate’s education committee found that 15 of the largest for-profit higher-education companies spent an average of 23 percent of their budgets on marketing. The analysis said the Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, the largest of the for-profits, spent more than $1-billion on sales and marketing in the 2011 fiscal year; Apollo officials say that figure is $655-million. Nonprofit institutions, by contrast, spent an average of a half of 1 percent of their budgets on such outreach.
In Phoenix’s case, marketing takes many forms: billboards along interstates, television commercials, online ads. The university recently rolled out a glossy magazine, Phoenix Patriot, for its military students. And 60 or so representatives around the country work hard to establish inroads with education offices at military installations, to “become part of their Christmas-card list,” says Garland Williams, a retired Army colonel who for the past two years has run Phoenix’s military division.
With online platforms that appeal to adult learners, for-profit colleges enroll far greater proportions of military and veteran students than do nonprofit institutions. From 2009 to 2011, the for-profits pulled in roughly $1.65-billion of the $4.4-billion in Post-9/11 GI Bill dollars paid to colleges and universities. Among active-duty servicemembers, for-profit colleges collected more than half of all Department of Defense tuition-assistance benefits last year.
It’s no surprise, then, that proprietary colleges have been perceived as courting those students. The sector’s interest in them stems largely from a controversial law, known as the 90/10 rule, which Congress passed in 1998 to ensure that colleges did not derive all revenue from federal student aid. At least 10 percent of that revenue must come from other sources; both the GI Bill and tuition assistance for active-duty servicemembers can be counted as money from sources other than federal student aid.
Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, has been keeping a close eye on how for-profit colleges represent themselves to veterans. His organization, founded by student veterans in 2008, now has more than 450 chapters on campuses across the country. It relies heavily on peer-to-peer connections, linking veterans with one another to provide support during the transition from military to student life.
In April, Mr. Dakduk discovered that 40 or so chapters, all at for-profit institutions, were listing contact information for administrators or recruiters, not students, as the organization requires. He kicked those chapters out. He didn’t want to give the institutions a “blatant way of utilizing our platform to advertise their company,” he said at the time. Mr. Dakduk later reinstated 14 chapters after confirming that their student-veteran organizations were, in fact, led by veterans.
The for-profit sector has defended itself vigorously against allegations from Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Its trade group, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, along with the University of Phoenix, has joined veterans'-services organizations in advocating for mandatory counseling on GI Bill benefits.
The notion that for-profit colleges are singling out student veterans is unfounded, says Mr. Williams, of Phoenix, which was not on the student-veterans group’s list of suspended chapters. Phoenix attracts a robust proportion of students on the Post-9/11 GI Bill, but not through aggressive marketing, Mr. Williams says in an interview in his office, in Arizona. The institution offers what students want, and it employs veterans who understand their needs, he says. “We have the flexibility and the programs that that group of people is looking for.”
Veterans, he points out, make up only 4 percent of the university’s 355,800 students. “If we were targeting,” he says, “I would be held to a higher standard than that.”
Some observers argue that the veterans who wind up at for-profit colleges won’t get the support they need for an often stressful transition. But for-profits’ customer-oriented approach on the front end can be very attractive.
It was to Nick Ellis, who served four years as a combat cook in the Marine Corps. He first heard about the Post-9/11 GI Bill in the spring of 2010, nearly four years after he came home to Richmond, Va. He couldn’t wait to use the new program, but he didn’t know where to begin.
Then Mr. Ellis saw a TV commercial for the University of Phoenix. He soon called and was quickly transferred to the institution’s military division. From there he was connected with a representative in Richmond—a veteran—who talked with him at length about his educational goals and eventually walked him through the enrollment process. They talked every day for two and a half weeks, some days as many as three times.
Mr. Ellis, who is now 27, welcomed the constant contact. “I was nervous,” he says. “I’m a first-generation college student, so it’s all new to me.” Two years into his bachelor’s of science in business management at Phoenix, he has a 3.73 grade-point average. He loves his program, and he hopes to graduate next spring.
‘Veteran Friendly’
As colleges of all types recruit and enroll former servicemembers, the label “veteran friendly” turns up a lot. But what does it mean?
One of several outlets calling itself a source of information for collegebound veterans, VeteransBenefitsGIBill.com, deems an institution military-friendly if it provides “added support” for Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits; participates in both the Yellow Ribbon Program, in which colleges match the government’s GI Bill dollars, and a tuition-assistance program for military spouses; allows students to study entirely online; and has a “legitimate academic accreditation.”
Campus administrators and veterans’ advocates say those criteria are just some of what students might want. Being truly “veteran friendly,” they contend, means offering an array of resources to help veterans through college.
The American Council on Education recently unveiled a Web site to help colleges support veterans. It suggests ways to assist those coping with injuries or disabilities, for example, and helps colleges tailor career services to guide veterans in framing military experience for employers.
“This is such an emerging science,” says Wendy Lang, executive director of Operation College Promise, a four-year-old project affiliated with the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities that trains campus officials in programs for veterans. Accepting transfer credits, creating a veterans’ lounge, designating a point person: Each of those strategies appears to be working, she says. The impact of other programs—veterans-only classes or orientations, for instance—is still unclear.
Colleges are wise to consider how they can best help their student veterans, says Mr. Dakduk, of the national student-veterans group. But he cautions that the “friendly” label isn’t misleading all veterans, particularly those who are set on a certain location or degree program.
“We’re not giving veterans enough credit,” he says. After his service in the Marines, he went home to Las Vegas and enrolled at the University of Nevada. It was close to home, and it was affordable.
“These guys are smart,” Mr. Dakduk says of his fellow veterans. “I guarantee you, if somebody gets accepted to Johns Hopkins, they’re not going to be deterred from going there because it’s not on the veteran-friendly list.”
For Mr. Szoldra, the Marine with a head full of questions, choosing a college came down to a series of arbitrary calculations. Armed with a copy of GI Jobs magazine with a state-by-state spread on colleges, he zeroed in on Florida and weighed his options.
The University of Tampa, a private institution, had a modest enrollment (about 6,400 students) and was rather expensive, he thought. The University of South Florida, by contrast, was much bigger and far cheaper. Mr. Szoldra chose Tampa, a decision he now laughs at, with a hint of unease. A steeper price tag and smaller classes, he assumed, would make for a higher-quality education.
He’s happy with the choice. But more than two years later, the 28-year-old says he still gets mad thinking about how hard it was for him and fellow veterans to figure out how to get the most out of their education benefits.
Mr. Szoldra, who is studying management and entrepreneurship, has developed a new Web site, Collegeveteran.com. He hopes the site, which went live in November and has won three entrepreneurship contests, will make it easier for future veterans to find their way to college.
Two weeks ago he received a Facebook message from a Marine who is getting out in two months. Is law enforcement the only employment option for a former Marine? he asked. Mr. Szoldra was struck that a man who had endured the trials of war felt so uncertain about his future as a civilian.
“Brother,” he replied, “go to college.” The two plan to talk soon.
Correction (4/30/2012, 4:11 p.m.): This article originally misidentified in which branch of the armed forces Nick Ellis served. He was a combat cook in the Marine Corps, not the Army. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.