Education for Veterans - a Guest Post

I would like to welcome our guest author June Olsen, who contacted me requesting to have this posted on Penigma. Welcome June! We welcome this occasional guest poster as we have past guest authors.
 June Olsen's post:

The Merits of Funding College Attainment for Veterans 

Maria Canales spent five years in the U.S. Army, and then four years looking for work. Despite the fact that she had been trained in financial management during her tours in Germany and Iraq, she struggled to translate those skills to finding a job back home. Her experience earned her a profile on the White House blog, and made her one of the public faces for the effort to give veterans more support once they come home. 

What made the difference for Canales was the fact that she already had a support system of family and friends to rely on while she looked for a job, something not every veteran has the luxury to. Furthermore, she returned to school, giving her another advantage. Given the abundance of traditional and online college options today, it is imperative that veterans receive educational support upon returning from active service so they are given equal opportunities to succeed compared to civilians. 

Returning from Service 

Military service provides a valuable range of experience for servicemen and women, such as teamwork, dedication and a focus on the importance on completing your assigned task. Unfortunately, a tour of duty can provide disadvantages that most of the workforce does not need to face, by taking personnel out of the world we are accustomed to for some of the most important years in a young professional’s life.  

When the National Survey of Student Engagement first included veteran students in its findings in 2010, it found that veterans tended to be older than their fellow students and were twice as likely to have some form of disability. They also reported less engagement with the faculty and less support on campus. 

Failing to get the support they need will cause broad economic burdens in the future. While they are only eight percent of the United States population, veterans make up twenty percent of America’s homeless. Estimates by the Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs suggest that on any given night, more than 67,000 veterans are homeless, while another one and a half million veterans are at risk. And veterans account for 20 percent of all suicides in America each year. 

On the other hand, veterans who do adjust to civilian life can tell a very different story. Despite these statistics, and the fact that they are historically less likely to have received a college education than the population as a whole, veterans earn a slightly higher median income and are more likely to own a business, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Helping veterans join the workforce can not only relieve some of the pressure on social services, but inject new energy into the economy. 

The Data 

About 3.4 percent of respondents to the NSSE survey were veterans, but that number is growing fast. The Post-9/11 GI-Bill, passed by Congress in 2008, greatly expanded the financial resources available to veterans pursuing higher education. Eligible student veterans attending an in-state public college or university will have their full tuition and fees covered under the law, while veterans attending a private or out-of-state school can receive up to $17,500 for each academic year. With more than a million veterans under the age of 30, and nearly another two million between the ages of 30 and 40, initiatives like this could be just the thing to get our veterans, and our economy, back on their feet.

I encourage anyone who might be interested in more information to read this press release, from March 30 2012 jointly issued : "The supplement was co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and by the U.S. Department of Labor's Veterans' Employment and Training Service."  It makes interesting reading.

I would also like to add as context to June's post this report from the New York Times on efforts to reduce unemployment among veterans, and specifically provides the rationale for what the legislation attempts to do, how it intends to do it, and why it is the correct course of action to follow:

President Obama Signs Veterans Tax Credit Bill

By JAMES DAO

If anyone doubted that veterans remain potent political symbols, they need look no further than Congress’s ability to set aside partisan gridlock last week and overwhelmingly enact legislation providing tax credits to businesses that hire veterans. Flanked by veterans advocates, President Obama signed the bill into law this morning.
The “VOW to Hire Heroes Act” will provide tax credits of up to $2,400 for employers who hire veterans who have been unemployed at least 4 weeks; up to $5,600 for hiring veterans who have been unemployed longer than 6 months; and up to $9,600 for businesses that hire veterans who have service-connected disabilities and have been unemployed longer than 6 months.
Though the unemployment rate among veterans of all ages is actually lower than the overall population, the rate is high among veterans of the current wars, standing at 12 percent, compared with about 9 percent for the population at large. The higher rate is driven largely by widespread joblessness among veterans under 25 years old, whose unemployment rate was 30 percent last month.
There has long been debate among economists over whether tax credits actually create jobs, or simply reward businesses for hiring people that they would have hired anyway. In theAtlantic.com, Daniel Indiviglio wrote recently that the tax credits might create at most a few new jobs, but that they were mainly likely to encourage the hiring of veterans over nonveterans
“Few employers will create new jobs from scratch just to try to bring on more veterans and obtain the credit,” Mr. Indiviglio wrote.
But Mr. Indiviglio also asserted that shifting the proportion of new hires toward veterans would be a good thing by helping to correct what he called “a grave injustice.”
“If these brave men and women chose not to fight for their country but merely remained civilians instead years ago, then many would more likely be employed today,” he said.

Education for everyone has been one of the hot potatoes of the 2012 Presidential election cycle.  Rick Santorum famously criticized the President for trying to make college AND OTHER EDUCATION post K-12 more accessible.  The quote: [Obama wants] "every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training."

From the HuffPo:
Rick Santorum believes Obama wants to 'indoctrinate' students by encouraging higher college enrollment. The GOP hopeful sat down with Glenn Beck for a wide-ranging interview that aired Thursday, and he warned that higher education leads to secularization.
“I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because of their indoctrination mills, absolutely," he said. "The indoctrination that is going on at the university level is a harm to our country.”
Obama has recently doubled down on his efforts to boost college attendance, pushing to make schools more affordable and accountable.
Santorum told Beck that “62 percent of kids who go into college with a faith commitment leave without it,” but failed to say where he found that figure.

And on Good Morning America, the anti-education / anti-college / anti-science right wing went further where Santorum advocates that we should not be encouraging people to get higher education because they might not want it, because of his fear that it might make them less conservative, or more inclined to test and challenge religious beliefs.  But mostly it appears to be because he - Santorum - was not as popular as he wanted to be.:

“There are a lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college,” said Santorum.

“And to sort of lay out there that somehow this is — this is — should be everybody’s goal, I think, devalues the tremendous work that people who, frankly, don’t go to college and don’t want to go to college because they have a lot of other talents and skills that, frankly, college, you know, four-year colleges may not be able to assist them. "

“I mean, you look at the colleges and universities, George. This is not — this is not something that’s new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are — look, I’ve gone through it. I went through it at Penn State.  You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are — I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we — I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. ”

The Penn State faculty strongly repudiated that Santorum ever received a grade which was politically influenced.

Obama has advocated for more funding for education - for kids in preschool, for K-12, for post secondary education both college, junior college and technical or trade schools, and of course for veterans.  The tax credit legislation assists those who have achieved additional education after military service to not only have a greater opportunity to be hired by businesses, but to be hired for better jobs than they would be otherwise.  We need to be supporting our returning veterans with jobs; we need to be supporting them with more education, including as June Olsen notes above - COLLEGE education.  What we do not need to be doing is denigrating college or any other additoinal education, or making it more costly or unavailable.  The last thing we should be doing is to discourage anyone - but especially veterans - from pursuing their education.