A note from an old friend of KPC, appropriately redacted, but with a good question. I did not know of this provision, and it is an interesting question......
"I get out of the army after [many] years of [type of duty] on [date in 2010]. My plan was to fight to get into grad school at [some good places in the East, not on the coast].
My incentives have changed because of the new GI bill. The old GI bill paid a set amount of money per month for 3 years, regardless of where you went to school. The new GI bill pays your school tuition at any public school plus a set amount of money based on army allowances for housing. The highest allowances for housing are in San Francisco and Hawaii. I like sandy beaches and money so its time to apply to the University of Hawaii's economics masters program.
I wonder if colleges in high housing allowance areas will see an increase in applications from soldiers using GI benefits. How about colleges in really nice places that would normally be costly to attend? Interesting set of new incentives guys getting out now face."
And there are lots of those "guys," too. An interesting question. Thanks for writing.
3 comments:
Yeah, these recent changes are part of several that were hotly debated and would have provided different incentives on the margin. It's not a surprise that the Democratic majority has a higher percentage of members from high housing cost (and other high costs of living) like San Francisco and Hawaii.
A proposed change that got shot down was a proposal to allow GI bill benefits to be transferred to a family member or spouse instead, so that, for example, your spouse could get benefits while you were in the military. Another proposed change would have had more a sliding scale for benefits that increased with years of service. As you might imagine, both of those changes would have encouraged people already in the military to stay longer; it is perhaps unsurprising that Republicans supported them and Democrats opposed those two changes.
FWIW, there was a pretty informative story on this in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. not so long ago. I'd link to it, but it's gated.
Let's not forget that incentives work in several ways. The Pentagon estimates that whatever loss of troops results from this new GI bill will be offset by an influx of new troops lured by the same benefits. In theory its zero sum. Another problem with the Republcan proposal was the much longer length of service necessary for veterans to recieve "full" GI benefits, in some cases up to 12 years.
Whatever your beliefs about these incentives, its nice that veterans now acutally get a meaningful GI Bill under which they can afford to get their well deserved education without resorting to student loans, which was an increasingly common occourance under the previous GI Bill with its much lower benefit levels.
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