Education benifit for service to our country is great, and I am glade to hear that they are going to make it more flexable. We should remember expecially right now in this political season. We join the Military to serve our country first! Education benifits, is the thank you from Uncle Sam. The real education comes first (blood, bullets, and bombs) comes before books.
I hope that it does run smoothly, but I doubt it. It is still hard for me to get my tuition assistance paid in time and processed correctly!
I do believe, however, that a lot of the blame lies with the VA Benefits representatives at the colleges/ universities. They are lazy and bitter (for the most part) and don't want to do their jobs.
Ditto to Persy's comment. I'm not going to name the trade school I attend because it's otherwise been fantastic, but they definitely dropped the ball when it came to helping me process my GI Bill payments--which of course CANNOT happen without some input from the school.
The program I'm in is very popular with vets (5/20 of the guys in class are vets) and I'd told the admissions folks *numerous* times that I intended to use the G.I. bill. So I did all the paperwork on my side, gave my school a copy of my DD-214, sent it off, assumed the school would do its part and waited for the check, like an idiot.
School starts, no checks...I call the VA to check up on it and find out that they're waiting on enrollment verification from my school. They name 3 people at my school who are pre-certified to verify it through VA's web site, so it will be processed within a day. Neat. I call back and get one of those 3 people on the phone, and she seems to have no idea what I'm talking about and wants to mail the form instead, which will add at least another week of delay and probably more.
Eventually I convinced her to figure out the damn web page, and they did process my verification and now I'm just waiting on the V.A.
Moral of the story: never assume anybody is going to do their part. Trust, but verify. A polite "just checking on the status of this..." call will do wonders.
As the wife of a retired soldier I am once again shocked at the continuous betrayal of the government. All military should fall under the same rules. What is good for one should be good for all.
