Op-Ed: Regulators’ Disdain for Alternative Higher Education Options Hurts Veterans

Military members’ and veterans’ education benefits are not grants from the federal government; they are earned benefit payments in exchange for services rendered, National Defense Committee executive director Bob Carey writes in the Odgen Standard-Examiner.

But the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) must not have gotten the memo. These agencies dictate how and where military members and veterans can use their education benefits. It’s the equivalent of saying: “Here’s your paycheck. By the way, you can only shop at the Base Exchange. You can’t shop at Target.”

“We always thought the Department of Education was there for our kids, but they are there for traditional [higher education] institutions,” Utah Congressman Burgess Owens said during an interview with National Defense Committee at the Republican National Convention. “It’s time to take the power back and enact generational change.”

The Education Department and VA selectively target career colleges, online program managers and other successful higher ed institutions and vendors with regulations and ginned-up penalties to force students into traditional colleges and universities—schools that spend lavishly to protect their status with federal policymakers.

“The 90/10 Rule and Gainful Employment Rule — which apply exclusively to proprietary schools — are fancy names for roadblocks the agencies put in the way of students to deter them from options that may better suit their needs,” Mr. Carey writes. “If these protections are so necessary, why are they not applied uniformly to all colleges and universities?”

Read Mr. Carey’s full piece here: https://shorturl.at/sgX26