A Cloud Over the GI Bill

Current provisions of the post-9/11 GI Bill  allow any retired military member with ten years of service to transfer his/her education benefits to allow his/her spouse or children to go to college. More than 38,000 military children and spouses went to college this past year with this support. As of today, 145,000 service members have applied to transfer GI Bill benefits to 331,000 children and spouses, as reported by Tom Philpott in a September 17 aarticle in Stars and Stripes.

This has become quite controversial for a number of reasons.  First, the cost is enormous. Congressional auditors estimate the transferability feature would add $10 billion to program costs over the first decade. 

The other problem is that the intent of the GI Bill seems to be subverted by moving the focus away from providing a benefit to the returning soldier to help him/her make a success of life after the military. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), chief architect of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, says that the original concern of the GI Bill was “the citizen soldier who spends a tour and then returns to civilian life.  They are the ones who were to benefit, as they did from the original GI bill, the World War II GI Bill. To help these people get on with the rest of their lives has been my main focus,” Webb said.

Now it seems the military uses transferability as a way to get military personnel to re-enlist. As Webb points out, “I’d like to see senior leaders over there spend more time talking about how great this benefit is for the people who leave the military.  Yet every time I come over they want to talk to me about transferability…I remind them they ought to be just as happy about those people who have gotten out."

DoD has no plans to tighten transferability rules or change the strategy to foster reenlistment. Robert E. Clark, assistant director for accession policy at DoD, says it is a means “to address the force management goals of the services, while allowing career service members to share the benefits they've earned with their families.”

It’s hard to know what to think about this.  It’s great if a parent wants to serve longer as a means to help his or her family, and transferability is fairer to those servicemen and women who, for whatever reason, are not interested in using the GI Bill themselves. Still, I can’t help but picture what it must be like for someone nearing the end of an enlistment period to be told they can help their children more by reenlisting than by going home for good.   Some may not see other options, and some may have decided that the military will be their career, but I would hate to think that any soldier with a young family, who is nearing the end of his or her enlistment, would choose the remote goal of their education over the immediate need to be home to see his or her children grow up. 

Perhaps the added family stability and the example of the college-going parent would increase the likelihood of the children going to college anyway.  Wouldn’t everyone would benefit from that?