Service members in school: Military veterans' experiences using the Post-9/11 GI Bill and pursuing postsecondary education

When the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act—better known as the Post 9/11 GI (Government Issue) Bill—was signed into law on June 20, 2008, it represented the largest expansion of veterans’ education benefits since passage of the original GI Bill in 1944. The new GI Bill took effect on August 1, 2009, thereby increasing the higher education benefits available to individuals who served on active duty in the U.S. armed forces after September 10, 2001. One year later, more than half a million current and former service members had applied for eligibility certification (Carter, 2010) and just over 300,000 had used the benefits to enroll in higher education (White House, 2010). Because a student’s Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits depend on the state and location of the educational institution and are paid to both institutions and students, and because the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had only a little more than a year to upgrade its claims processing systems, early implementation posed several challenges, especially with regard to delayed and erroneous payments (Maze, 2010a; McBain, 2009; Philpott, 2009). Given these challenges, many of which had been anticipated (Wilson, 2009), the American Council on Education (ACE) asked the RAND Corporation to study students’ experiences using the Post-9/11 GI Bill in its first year of availability. The study set out to understand early Post-9/11 GI Bill implementation challenges from the perspective of both college students and higher education institutions and to gain insight into how higher education institutions can more effectively support returning veterans.