Maximize the new GI Bill p1 - GI Bill Benefits - Tuition Assistance for the Military - Military Times EDGE

Peter Kim was back from Iraq and recovering from ankle surgery when he got the call from Columbia University in 2005. The then-Marine Corps reservist had worked hard in high school, and it always bugged him that he was wait-listed for Cornell University after he graduated in 1998.

“I didn’t realize how competitive it was,” Kim said.

It wasn’t until his deployment in 2004 that senior staff rekindled Kim’s Ivy League aspirations.

“There in Iraq, I found Columbia,” he said.

And thanks in part to Kim, outgoing president of the U.S. Military Veterans of Columbia University, future Columbia vets will have a lot easier time paying for college. Kim kept administrators at Columbia’s School of General Studies informed while the Post-9/11 GI Bill made its way through Congress.

When news spread of the Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program, a new GI Bill provision pertaining to private colleges, Columbia’s students and university leadership recognized an opportunity.

The new GI Bill’s basic benefit pays for tuition and fees up to a state’s highest in-state tuition at a public university, and there’s a housing stipend equal to the Basic Allowance for Housing for an E-5 with dependents in the school’s ZIP code. To help students who attend more costly private universities, legislators created the Yellow Ribbon Program, which says the Veterans Affairs Department will match any additional amount a school agrees to pay toward a vet’s full costs.

“We were thrilled when we looked at the numbers for individual students. I rarely see that in any scholarship program,” said Curtis Rodgers, dean of enrollment management for the School of General Studies. “The impact to the individual student was so great that we went in at 50 percent.”

That means with the VA match, a Columbia vet’s full benefit will be worth more than $65,000 a year, Rodgers said.

Columbia’s School of General Studies tailors its services to adult students, and most of Columbia’s vets are enrolled there. He expects news of Columbia’s participation in the Yellow Ribbon Program to mean even more vets will enroll.

Unlike Kim, Army vet Sean O’Keefe entertained no notions of an Ivy League education when he graduated from high school in 2002. He was an average student — mostly into sports and cars. He took a year of community college courses in California after the Army, and he turned out to be pretty good at school. That’s when he started thinking big, as in Harvard or Columbia.

O’Keefe stopped collecting Montgomery GI Bill payments when he heard about the new GI Bill. Family members have been helping him cover expenses while he has waited for the new GI Bill to take effect. He estimates he has used a total of nine months of his 36-month entitlement. The rest will pay for the remainder of his Columbia bachelor’s in economics and political science, plus law school, he hopes, down the road.

Because of his injury, Kim’s full Columbia tuition was paid for under the Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment Program, also known as “Chapter 31,” but he’ll have some remaining months of new GI Bill benefits to use in the future.

Kim says veterans groups at private universities should get involved in their schools’ decisions over whether to participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program.