Yellow Ribbon Program
Written by Kenya McCullum and Ted McKenna
Currently under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, veterans attending college can receive funding equal to the highest tuition charged by a public college or university in their home state. Private schools often cost more, of course, leaving a potentially hefty bill for veterans to cover if they opt not to attend their local public college—or enroll at a private online school that costs more than the schools in their state’s public education system.
Under the Yellow Ribbon program, participating institutions agree to waive up to 50 percent of this difference in tuition and fees, with the VA matching the school’s chosen pledge.
“As with any student, cost will always be a factor when a veteran is deciding where he or she should go to school,” said Keith Wilson, director of education service at the Veterans Benefits Administration. “Potentially, the Yellow Ribbon program can mitigate this cost factor significantly, if not eliminate it entirely.”
As MAE went to press, the list of private schools planning to provide tuition subsidiaries to make up the difference between in-state public school tuition and the typically higher private school tuition continued to grow. Nearly 100 schools so far have announced their participation in the Yellow Ribbon program, including Amherst College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University and George Washington University, according to an unofficial listing of participants on the Website of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, at www.naicu.edu.
To be eligible to receive Yellow Ribbon benefits, students must have served at least 36 months of active duty after September 10, 2001; have received an honorable discharge because of a service-related disability subsequent to 30 continuous days of service after September 10, 2001; or be a dependent of a veteran that is eligible for these benefits.
In May, the VA began issuing certificates of eligibility for students to present to their participating colleges. Once the students’ enrollment information has been confirmed, payments will be made to their schools and their stipends will be issued.
SCHOOL BENEFITS
Students are not the only ones that will enjoy the benefits of participating in the Yellow Ribbon program. For schools, this can be an invaluable means to diversify their student body with students who bring, among other things, different experiences and a sense of discipline and dedication to studies.
Denison University President Dale Knobel said that his school, a liberal arts college in Ohio, in part joined the program to help broaden the range of men and women that attend the school.
“We’re a place that tries to attract students from all over the country and from all kinds of backgrounds because we believe that students learn from one another,” Knobel said. “Enrolling students with different backgrounds enriches the educational experience of all of our students. Clearly, military service is another set of experiences that give people a perspective and ideas that may not be shared by young people coming directly out of high school.”
Also, some schools said they joined the Yellow Ribbon program to show their appreciation for the sacrifices veterans made to serve our country.
“At Briar Cliff University, we truly do appreciate their service to our country, and we value and emphasize service here,” said the school’s president, Beverly Wharton. “It is part of our culture and our Franciscan heritage, so the Yellow Ribbon program seemed like the right fit—and participation is one way for us to really thank our veterans.”
FUNDING CONSIDERATIONS
But observers noted that the VA’s release of details about the program came very late in the academic year, well past the annual budgeting process for schools. Allocation of funds has been especially difficult this year given the economic recession, which has cut university endowments an average of 24 percent and placed increased strain on the financial aid system, as more students and families hit with job losses struggle to make ends meet, noted Anne Gross, vice president of regulatory affairs for the National Association for College and University Business Officers (NACUBO).
“I think schools are under particular pressure because they have a lot of students who are financially challenged,” Gross said. “Schools’ endowments have suffered, their students have suffered, money is tight and crystal balls aren’t working very well. In general, schools are very supportive of veterans. They really are on board with wanting to help. But if money is tight, they are figuring they can only either help more students to a lesser extent or help fewer students to more of an extent.”
Tony Pals, director of public information for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), said that he expects the list of Yellow Ribbon participants to grow significantly by the June 15 deadline set by the VA for participation in the program in the upcoming academic year.
“We expect to see a strong level of participation this year, and I imagine the number of schools participating next year will be even higher,” Pals said. “The timing of the implementation of this was difficult for everyone. The VA was forced to operate on the fast track, and the difficulty that some colleges have had is that these rules were not fleshed out until after budgets were set. That’s one reason why participation in the second year of the program is likely to increase.”
TUITION DISCREPANCIES
A large part of that calculation is based on exactly what state the potential Yellow Ribbon participating school is. Anomalies in the rate of public school tuitions around the country mean that even the most expensive private schools in Texas, for instance, hardly need the Yellow Ribbon program at all for veterans to attend school for free, noted Jim Selbe, assistant vice president for lifelong learning initiatives at the American Council on Education. The most spectacular anomalies are Colorado and Oregon, though, where helicopter training programs costing over $42,000 at community colleges have been used as the definition of the highest rate of public school tuition in those states.
“These are special issues because of the course of studies [available] in those states, but I can’t imagine that Senators Warner and Webb [the initial sponsors of the new GI Bill and Yellow Ribbon legislation] meant to say that veterans can go to any school whose tuition is under $80,000 a year,” Selbe said.
On the opposite end of the tuition controversy is California, whose public schools don’t officially charge any tuition, though their additional “fees,” which effectively cover the costs otherwise covered by tuition but are not matched by the Yellow Ribbon program, make would-be participation in the Yellow Ribbon program hugely expensive for schools like Stanford or Pepperdine. The Post-9/11 GI bill does cover more than $6,000 a year in fees, but that comes nowhere near covering the more than $40,000 in tuition and fees charged by some private schools in California.
“In effect, what’s happening is that veterans in California don’t have access to choice,” NAICU’s Pals said. “It’s very difficult for a private college in California to participate as opposed to schools in Texas.”
Experts tracking the unrolling of the new GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon program expect that Congress will eventually make some sort of alteration in the rules to make Yellow Ribbon participation easier in California, as well as make other adjustments to the rules, such as allowing individual schools within a university to have their own contract with the VA.
The VA’s Wilson declined to speculate on whether there would be any changes or what they might be, though he told MAE that “any legislative changes prior to full program implementation would increase the risk to successfully paying benefits on time.”
But while changes are not likely to occur until sometime after official start date for application on August 1, to avoid hindering the process for students applying to attend schools that have already signed on to the Yellow Ribbon program, lobbying has already begun.
“I know that some of the veterans groups are already up on the Hill, working on these issues with members,” NACUBO’s Gross said. “It would surprise me if Congress didn’t do something, because the tuition and fees are so disparate in the different states that I can’t believe they can’t come up with a different way. I don’t think anybody had thought about these outlier issues. It’s just going to take some period of time to make adjustments.” ♦