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Compromise on GI Bill

The Post-9/11 GI Bill is a tremendous achievement and perhaps the richest benefit ever offered to veterans.

Now some lawmakers want to make it even better.

Their plans to enhance the new GI Bill generally would fix mistakes and unintended consequences for a bill that rapidly became law in 2008 and began paying benefits only last August. But a few of the proposed fixes may have unintended consequences of their own.

Chief among these is a proposal to pay the program’s living stipend to veterans who use the GI Bill to cover online tuition costs. The stipend is equal to the military’s housing allowance for married E-5s in the community where the school is located.

Today, students taking distance-learning courses are not eligible for the housing money unless they are taking at least one course on a brick-and-mortar college campus. This results in some people signing up for community college courses they might not need just to get the living stipend.

Veterans groups want Congress to approve the living stipend for all distance-learning students in order to eliminate a perceived inequity between traditional and online schools.

It is unclear if Congress originally intended to favor traditional schools. But there is little question that such students benefit not only from class time and face-to-face interaction with professors, but also from being immersed in a vibrant, real-world intellectual community brimming with extracurricular and cultural activities and opportunities.

Similarly, there is some benefit to the nation as a whole and to the military each time a veteran steps into a classroom and displays the discipline, confidence and maturity developed over four or six or eight years in uniform.

It’s not just that such veterans can be walking, talking recruiting posters, but rather the benefit derived from integrating these vets back into a society that is increasingly disconnected from the military and veteran populations.

That said, online universities also fill a vital need, particularly for veterans. Distance learning schools are more likely than traditional schools to give credit for courses taken elsewhere, so people who took some college courses while on active duty are less likely to have to retake classes they’ve already completed.

And for veterans who are married or are raising children, distance learning is a more flexible and easier fit into a family schedule.

The stumbling block has been how to determine what the living stipend should be for distance learning students, especially amid concerns that under the current benefit structure, some people might be incentivized to move to higher-cost areas just to get a larger payment.

Two potential solutions have been floated: Make their stipend equal to the average housing allowance for a married E-5 — $1,350 per month — or base the payment on the military housing allowance for a student’s location at the time he filed for GI Bill benefits.

Both approaches are flawed. The former would hurt distance learners who do, in fact, live in high-cost areas; the latter would encourage gaming the system, creating an incentive to apply from high-cost locales, even for those who don’t intend to stay.

Here’s a better solution: Pay the living stipend to distance learning students only after they have lived in one community for at least six months.

Some people might still try to game the system, but six months is a reasonable length of time to prove an intent to put down roots in a community.