Tangible way to support troops
Imagine doing your time in Iraq or Afghanistan, and coming home with ambitions to get an education that will allow you to settle into civilian life.
You sign up for classes at an expensive for-profit college, taking courses in auto repair or criminal justice, and then the school shuts down before you get your degree. Or you get a degree, but find your credentials don’t count for much when hunting for a job.
That’s the predicament some service members have found themselves in. After finishing their tours of duty, they used educational benefits provided under the GI Bill that cover a four-year undergraduate education or its equivalent, and put them toward a degree at for-profit schools that ended up going out of business, like California-based Corinthian Colleges. The benefits can’t be replenished, so the veterans are basically out of luck.
On Wednesday, President Obama marked Veterans Day by asking Congress to approve a measure that would extend the educational benefits of veterans who were burned when a for-profit educational institution collapsed. He is also asking that programs that enroll veterans meet state standards – job-placement rates at some for-profit schools are notoriously low – and that for-profit schools, which are large consumers of federal student aid, get no more than 85 percent of their funding from federal coffers. As it stands, the cap is 90 percent.
Obama’s proposals are – surprise! – meeting Republican resistance on Capitol Hill. But giving veterans a chance to get a meaningful education that can lead to gainful employment is a tangible way of supporting our troops.