Credit for service p1 - Military - Education Strategies and Tips - Military Times EDGE

Transferring your military training into college credit is a little like changing your money into a foreign currency. You hand over your dollar bills, receive a pile of exotic-looking paper in return and tuck it in your wallet. Then you stride out into an unfamiliar economy, not quite sure what your cash is worth.

Will the new currency be accepted where you want to spend it? How much can you get in return? Do you even want whatever it is you can buy? Many service members starting college have similar questions. The training and experience that make them so valuable to the country have a different value in the economy of higher education. And figuring out that value can be as confusing as shopping at a foreign bazaar.

Does the school you want to go to accept credits for military training? What degree does your credit count toward? Is that the degree you want?

It’s hard to give general answers to these questions because they depend so heavily on individual circumstances. But if you understand the principles of the marketplace, you’re more likely ask the right questions of yourself, your school and your education services officer — so you can invest the value of your experience well.

ACE recommendations

The fixed point at the center of this conversion for soldiers, sailors and Marines is the American Council on Education’s credit recommendations. Think of the ACE recommendations as a standardized rate of exchange.

Under a Defense Department contract, the nonprofit association evaluates thousands of Army, Navy and Marine Corps training schools and military occupational specialties to determine if they are up to college par, and its conclusions are all spelled out in an online Guide to the Evaluation of Educational Experiences in the Armed Services.

The decisions that matter to you are documented on your transcript in the Army/ACE Registry Transcript System (AARTS) and Sailor/Marine/ACE Registry Transcript (SMART).

The Air Force and Coast Guard maintain their own transcript service centers through the Community College of the Air Force and the Coast Guard Institute. ACE does not evaluate Air Force training because CCAF is an accredited institution.

ACE evaluators look at a school’s program of instruction (a detailed syllabus), instructor material, samples of student material, any labs and equipment, and its assessment tools, said Cynthia Bruce, director of military evaluations at the organization.

Evaluators are not just administrators paging through documents in an office, Bruce said. They are active college faculty, and they visit each installation to make their decisions about what kind, and what level, of college course the military training is equivalent.

“There is academic rigor in the process,” Bruce said. “Many colleges and universities don’t understand that.”

Courses must be at least 45 hours to be evaluated, and quite a few receive no credit, Bruce said. Sometimes the content is just too military specific, or the testing tool is not sufficient for the material.

She recalled one training course at Dam Neck, Va., that was 1,200 hours long, but the only test was a 200-question, multiple-choice exam. ACE awarded no credit, but might if the testing assessment changed.

School policy

The AARTS and SMART transcripts tell you what your military training and experience might be worth in academia, but keep in mind that not all schools want to do business.

Schools are not required to accept ACE recommendations — hence the term “recommendation.” More than 2,300 schools do, according to ACE, but even those might have some restrictions: only for certain degrees, or only for elective courses, or only up to a certain limit, for example.

Some may award credit for training courses but not for MOSs. Some may accept lower-division credits (associate or 100- and 200-level courses) but not upper-division credits (300- or 400-level courses).

Former Marine Cpl. John Temple didn’t quite understand all the possible restrictions when he separated in 2006 to go to college. The former supply warehouse clerk will graduate this spring with a bachelor’s degree in English from Western Carolina University, where he transferred after earning an associate degree from Coastal Carolina Community College. He was not expecting to receive English credit toward his major, but he also wasn’t expecting what he got: a single PE credit.

“I thought it would all apply to something — maybe electives,” he said. “I was hoping to get some electives out of the way.”

Many institutions post their transfer policies on their Web sites, but you may have to dig to extract the specific requirements for military training.

On the other hand, Bruce said, more colleges have started designing degree programs around military training so they can, in fact, award more “meaningful credit” — credit toward required classes for a degree and not just electives.

Then the question becomes: Is that the degree you want?

Degree choice

Your choice of degree probably affects the academic value of your military credits more than any other factor, and could mean the difference between shaving a semester or two off your college time line and starting from scratch.

Service members don’t always realize it’s not just what training and schooling they have, said Denise Hazlett, director of military evaluations at Central Texas College.

She gets a lot of questions from soldiers about why their buddy — who is doing the same job or taking the same course — got more credit than they did. “They think it’s all equal,” she said.

She has to explain that the second part of the equation, their degree plan, is just as important.

The closer your area of study aligns with your military expertise, the further your credit will go.

Most service members understand this, but not all, said Mary Jo Watlington, academic counseling coordinator at the Servicemembers Opportunity College Consortium. She once had to convince a soldier’s father that, no, colleges would not accept his son’s marksmanship training for humanities credit.

Education goals and military training dovetailed nicely for Army Spc. Bradley Darnell, a food service specialist who started working on his associate degree in restaurant and culinary management at Central Texas College not long after he was assigned to Fort Hood in late 2008.

The school accepted ACE’s recommended nine semester hours for his training at Fort Lee, Va.

“I was ecstatic,” he said. Those 9 semester hours, plus the one semester hour of credit that he received for PE, allowed him to graduate a semester early.

Darnell didn’t choose his degree just to maximize his credits; he loves his work, and he wants to continue in the field after he leaves the service. The 10 semester hours he received were a happy surprise.

But Hazlett sees quite a few students who decide to switch degrees when they find out they can get more credit for a different one that is more comparable with their training, or one that includes more elective hours. Many need the promotion points and are looking for the path of least resistance, she said.

It’s fine to have a short-term goal of promotion, but it’s even better if the short-term goal fits into a long-term plan.

“If I have a student who wants to maximize their credit, I would discuss with them — what is their career goal?” Hazlett said.

If your career goal is at right angles to your military career, you probably should resign yourself to writing off most, if not all, of the credit on your military transcript.

Former Army Staff Sgt. Peter Nesbitt thinks he might have been able to get credit in an engineering program for his training as a signals intelligence analyst, but the possibility of a few semester hours didn’t tempt him to stray from his plan to study international politics. He enrolled in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in 2009 after serving six years in uniform.

While on active duty, Nesbitt earned an associate degree in intelligence operations from Cochise College with help from 15 credits for the Basic Noncommissioned Officers Course at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. But the only credit from his military career that Georgetown accepted was from the Defense Language Institute, which is an accredited higher learning institution. None of the credit from his AARTS transcript transferred.

“The one class that was a possibility for credit didn’t work,” he said. It was a public speaking credit from BNCOC, but the school was not able to supply a detailed syllabus, so Georgetown couldn’t evaluate how closely the course matched its own.

He’s philosophical about how it worked out. His training was valuable to him in the military, and the courses he took from other schools kept him sharp, he said.

“I understand why it is. I could always dream about having more credits — but that’s not how schools work.”

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Finding your degree

If you want help figuring out military credit and whether it fits into your education goals, start with your installation’s education center, recommends Kathie Walsh, chief of counseling at the Fort Hood center. “We’re going to give unbiased answers,” she says.

One resource that she and Mike Engen, acting education services officer at Fort Hood, Texas, point soldiers to is the Army Career Degree Plans offered by members of the Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges Consortium’s Degree Network System. The plans spell out degree options specifically related to Army MOSs and exactly what options you have to complete each course, including credit for training and experience. The colleges and universities offering these degrees guarantee the award of specified credit based on learning in military service school courses and Army workplace experience.

Soldiers can search by MOS or college at www.soc.aascu.org/socad/ACD.html.

The Navy College Program offers a similar resource, its Distance Learning Partnership Schools, which offer rating-relevant degrees. Sailors can search by rating or school at https://www.navycollege.navy.mil/storefront.cfm. Marines can search for degrees by occupational specialty in the Marine Corps Career Colleges Program at www.soc.aascu.org/socmar/MCCCP.html.

Evaluating what you have

Only the school itself can give you an official evaluation of your credit. Many don’t finish that evaluation until after you enroll and complete a class or two, but some schools will do an unofficial evaluation to give you an idea, said Mike Engen, acting education services officer at Fort Hood.

At Hood, ESOs and on-post representatives from different colleges hold a military evaluation day twice a year so soldiers can get a sense of how military and other credit might be applied to different degrees.

The evaluators at your school should be able to steer you away from classes you might not need to take while you wait for the evaluation to be done, said Denise Hazlett, director of military evaluations at Central Texas College.

“I can give them an idea of what they could expect. ... ‘At this particular time, stay away from this course and this course,’” she said. “There’s nothing worse than a student taking a course that they have completed.”

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Related links

• Servicemembers Opportunity Colleges: www.soc.aascu.org/socmar/MCCCP.html

• American Council on Education: www.acenet.edu

• ACE Guide to the Evaluation of Educational Experiences in the Armed Forces: http://militaryguides.acenet.edu

• A Transfer Guide: Understanding Your Military Credit Recommendations, from ACE: www.acenet.edu/militaryprograms/transferguide