By This is something I can soon see hitting the other services as well, the reduction of the highly popular tuition assistance programs:
Okinawa — The Marine Corps announced Tuesday it has slashed tuition assistance by 80 percent for servicemembers who take classes on their off-duty time.
The change went into effect immediately and reduces the maximum education assistance available from the Department of Defense standard of $4,500 per year to just $875 per year for Marines — about enough to cover two university courses, according to a service-wide bulletin. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link but isn’t it interesting that with all these politicians complaining about veteran unemployment that something like tuition assistance that helps servicemembers with getting a job after completing their service is reduced? In total the US military spent $542 million dollars on tuition assistance which in this article was called a skyrocketing cost. Yet in Afghanistan the Pentagon has reportedly spent $140 billion dollars on wasteful contracts. Then you factor in other waste in the government like the Solyndra scandal which the funding for that could have paid for a year of the tuition assistance for the entire US military.
I think programs like tuition assistance is something beneficial to the military, I just think it just needs to be better managed to where servicemembers are using that money on earning real degrees. What I have seen before is servicemembers getting degrees from some shady online university that aren’t worth anything but allows them to check the block on their military career progression that they completed their bachelor’s or master’s degree.
7:07 am on October 25th, 2011 1
The article on “Pentagon looks at military-wide tuition assistance plan to cut costs” says:
This implies the Tuition Assistance funds are part of a larger funding pots. While Congress set a maximum each service can allocate towards tuition assistance per service member, each service can choose to allocate less, apparently when they decide they would rather use that portion of funds for other purposes. So, it comes down to where each service decides to place its priorities and the Marine Corps has decided the tuition funding will be less of a priority than some other needs.
It points out a potential problem for a military-wide tuition assistance plan. As it stands now, each service has different needs and interests in the education of their service members. That becomes obvious when you look at the different promotion requirements for each of the services. Some give promotion points for higher education and some don’t. Until there is standardization across the services of how they the consider higher education advancement of the their service member, a military-wide tuition assistance plan won’t be equitable.
8:36 am on October 25th, 2011 2
I wonder if the Marines are doing this while they try to get a handle on how much money is blown by giving to cheesy for-profit online schools, for “education” that is neither transferable to a real school, or particularly worth the money?
8:54 am on October 25th, 2011 3
I don’t know what the state of tuition assistance is now, but at least up into the 1990s, Air Force Education offices were only allowed to approve tuition assistance for accredited institutions.
I would hope that is still the case.
12:24 pm on October 25th, 2011 4
pay the fee get a B at UMUC. See?
12:35 pm on October 25th, 2011 5
But if you are gay
do you get an A
if you say
that they
are discriminat-o-ray?
5:20 pm on October 25th, 2011 6
seeing the commerical on AFN saying that you can now get housing allowance at an E-5 rate with dependents and ONLY attend online classes clearly shows why there are budget issues across the board
that is ridiculous
1:35 am on October 26th, 2011 7
I worked with UMUC and you had to earn your A or B. If you just showed up to class and did at least a half-arsed job on most of the assignments, you’d get a C.
And yeah, this smells a bit like they’re trying to squeeze out the expensive diploma mills, like the University of Phoenix. Ironically, though, the U of P provides a better educational environment in its few classrooms in Yongsan than it does back in the States.
8:56 am on November 5th, 2011 8
#6 the program you are referring to is the post 9-11 GI bill, not military tuition assistance. Two different programs.