Reformed GI Bill to extend benefits to National Guardsmen

As student veterans are facing eliminated break pay, National Guard members will receive additional benefits under two components of a modified GI Bill that will save $734 million throughout the next decade.

Veterans attending this university said they generally support the measures, which take effect Aug. 1 for the fall semester and preserve most students' extensive tuition, books and housing benefits.

The Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act covers the college costs for veterans who served in the armed forces any time after Sept. 11, 2001; the bill began to apply to students at this university in fall 2009.

When the Post-9/11 GI Bill first became law, Congress didn't realize they were excluding people, according to a spokesman for the Veterans Affairs office. The new bill, informally known as GI Bill 2.0, includes more veterans, such as National Guardsmen, whose benefits are now calculated based on time spent serving in peaceful disaster relief as well as in combat.

"Its theme was to tweak the problems we had with the original bill," said senior criminology and criminal justice major and National Guardsman Andrew Creveling, president of Terp Vets and an Iraq veteran. "The first one was not perfect. There was a lot of people being left out."

However, some veterans who had been using break pay — benefits received between fall and spring semesters regardless of class attendance — might feel a financial pinch during this university's particularly long winter vacation.

"For a school like Maryland, where the break is long at six weeks, it could be seen as something really negative versus another school where it's only a two-week Christmas break," said Marine Corps veteran Matthew Marsh, vice president of programming for Terp Vets and a senior mechanical engineering major.

However, several student veterans said they didn't know anyone who uses break pay because it uses up a finite supply of education credits; the bill allows 36 months of fully-funded higher education, so applying those months to December and January can leave a veteran stuck paying their own way in a future semester.

Students will continue to receive a reduced benefit to help cover their housing costs during winter break.

The bulk of the bill's savings stem from a provision that affects veterans attending private schools — the credit dropped from $20,000 per student per year to $17,500. Veterans at public universities will continue to have their full educational costs covered.

In addition to these measures, GI Bill 2.0 will also reimburse veterans for more than one national "exam for higher learning" — the SAT, ACT, GMAT and LSAT. It also covers housing costs for veterans attending vocational schools and taking classes online.

"[These] enhancements will really help a number of our students to enjoy greater financial security," said Marsha Guenzler-Stevens, director of Stamp Student Union and an advocate for veteran affairs.

Another change student veterans have noticed since the original Post-9/11 GI Bill is a more rapid payment of benefits. When the law first went into effect, many students were looking to file their paperwork with both the university and the Veterans Affairs office.

"In the beginning, there was such an influx in people that starting coming back to school and that were applying for these benefits, it took a while to get your claim processed," Creveling said. "So that was a big problem last year when it first opened up. A lot of it's been streamlined, and a lot of it's been fixed."

University veterans said they will also see a big impact from the university's Veterans Program Office — unrelated to the GI Bill — which has received grants of $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Education and $125,000 from university alumnus and former Secretary of the Navy Gordon England to improve services on the campus, including a new lounge in Cole Field House set to debut on April 30.

marcot at umdbk dot com