By: Joshua Lawton-Belous

As student veterans head back to college many are feeling a financial pinch. The promises made by the Veterans Administration and many politicians have not come to pass. The Post 9/11 G.I. Bill BAH payments are still a mess, leaving many student veterans scrambling to find jobs, in a recession, in order to get by. How close is the Veterans Administration to fixing this mess? They processed today 7,344 applications. But how many more applications are left to process? The Veterans Administration has not released those numbers, nor do they provide them on their website.

Yet the problem with the current V.A. system is that the number of applications processed has not risen significantly enough to relieve the deluge of applications which have come in the Spring semester. While the verification process should be shorter for those who have already been processed for the Fall semester, the same two step process for both paying BAH payments and tuition is the same. Failing the introduction of a fail safe automated verification system, or the massive hiring and training of verifying officials, it is not foreseeable that student veterans will be able to rely on receiving their BAH checks.

Unfortunately many student veterans may be left in an academic purgatory by the lack of action on the part of the Veterans Administration. Schools with some of the largest student veteran populations in Virginia have not yet received tuition payments. Fortunately for student veterans attending George Mason University a policy has been set in place, allowing student veterans to register and graduate even if payment has not been made by the V.A. for their tuition. Yet only several miles away from George Mason University, student veterans at Northern Virginia Community College, are being prevented from registering due to absent V.A. tuition payments. This prevention by Northern Virginia Community College does not only prevent student veterans from enrolling in the Spring semester, but also from receiving BAH payments from the V.A. for the Spring semester.

While the focus of the V.A. and student veterans has been on BAH payments, the V.A. also needs to consider how much debt a college can take on before it becomes financially infeasible for the college to accept the current tuition payment situation. Like most institutions, colleges are facing budget cuts. These budget cuts are made worse by debt accrued on behalf of taking care of student veterans. The inability of the V.A. to pay tuition in a timely manner, may result in those universities which have generous tuition matchups under the Yellow Ribbon Program to either decrease the matchup amount or pull out of the Yellow Ribbon Program altogether.

If both the BAH and the tuition payment debacle can not be fixed at the same time, the Veterans Administration needs to concentrate on fixing one problem at a time. As cruel as it may sound to student veterans, the Veterans Administration needs to concentrate on fixing their tuition payment system. While this will take money out of the pockets of student veterans initially, the majority of student veterans would pay more in tuition payments than they would receive in BAH payments.

What should happen is not necessarily will happen. Unfortunately in either scenario student veterans are taking the bullet. But by fixing first the tuition payments and then the BAH payments, rather than trying to fix both at the same time, student veterans’ dreams of going to college will have a fighting chance.

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