Veterans get a boost in education funds (The Press Enterprise)
Despite rising student fees, Ivan Krimker can finally rest easy about paying for his senior year at UC Riverside. The Marine Corps reservist will soon get a boost from the biggest increase in veterans' education benefits since after World War II.
The Post-9/11 G.I. Bill, which took effect Saturday, doubles tuition and education benefits for veterans nationwide. More than 2 million veterans live in California, and at least 30,000 attend colleges and universities here. When the money starts reaching schools this fall, the bill will provide considerably more benefits than the current G.I. Bill, which Krimker has been using for the past three years.
"It's a night and day difference," he said.
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The bill, signed into law by former President George W. Bush last summer, will pay undergraduate tuition and fees up to the cost of the most expensive public university in each state—California's is UC Berkeley, at $6,586 per term.
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A plan called the Yellow Ribbon program was also set up to pay the difference for veterans who want to attend private schools that cost more than the most expensive public university.
The benefits will be available to any active duty service members, National Guard personnel, reservists and veterans who served a minimum of 90 days after Sept. 11, 2001. The benefits are proportional to the amount of time a veteran served (maxing out at four years), and will be available up to 15 years after the end of their service. Active duty personnel will for the first time be able to transfer benefits to their spouses or children if they have served for six years and agree to serve four more….
4 comments:
I consider myself to be pretty liberal, and understand the G.I. Bill after WWII, but I don't get the concept in our contemporary era. I am anti-war and don't think creating incentives for the military is necessarily a good idea.If the goal of soldiers is to get an education upon enlistment, why don't we have an Educational Bill that allows them access to education bypassing the going to war part?
Hm, I would argue that if you were to dismantle the military (not an entirely bad idea with proper timing, I suppose), you should do so from the top down. Don't start by punishing people who believe they are doing you a service, and may very well be doing
you said service. I'd think, you should give them everything they need to be intelligent and healthy, until long after the military is gone.
And, I thought this GI stuff was meant to be a means of rehabilitating soldiers back in to society. A soldier who doesn't go to war doesn't need rehabilitating, unless he is afraid of obstacle courses, I suppose.
10:45, you raise a fundamental issue: how are we to regard our military and the people who volunteer to serve in it?
Unless one is a pacifist (we’ll leave that issue aside for now), one will recognize the need for an adequate military. It is, of course, a necessary evil. (This doesn’t make members of the military evil, of course.)
There’s a glaring moral issue at the heart of military service, namely, that, as a soldier, one abandons one’s moral autonomy to a significant extent. But that doesn’t settle anything, even morally, for a strong case can be made for the (moral) necessity of mechanisms and institutions that protect a decent society. That is, morally, we had better create a military (which, inevitably, involves massive numbers of yes-men [OK, yes-people]), for it is wrong to invite or allow war (invasion, etc.), given the moral consequences (evils) of war/invasion/attack. And yet a strong case can be made for the unavoidability of large numbers of moral yes-men (i.e., soldiers who are discouraged from questioning the wisdom of the nation’s use of military power). I don’t think this is a dilemma, since it seems obvious (to me) that a wise society chooses on the side of establishing a military, mitigating the moral problem to the extent possible.
One form of (moral) sacrifice, I think, is one’s very autonomy and integrity. (But let’s not get into these esoteric ethical issues.) Morally, things do get complicated.
Roughly speaking, I think that the Decent Society (to paraphrase Johnson) regretfully but necessarily chooses to build and maintain a military. Employing a degree of charity, it is right and decent for those of us who do not serve in the military to be grateful to those who do—at least when this involves real sacrifice (e.g., the sacrifice of accepting a relatively high risk of injury or death).
Roughly speaking, this category of citizen is in some sense the noblest, the most admirable (despite, and sometimes because of, the autonomy issue).
In my view, the Decent Society will place the care of these people, should they need care, high on the list of priorities. (Sadly, our own society has long been far south of decent in this regard. Very frustrating, dismaying.) Further, the Decent Society will reward those who, owing to the accidents of history, experience great risk (or sacrifice). Again, surely this must be a relatively high priority. (Our own society has not acted accordingly, in my view, though the new GI Bill, a bright spot, does reflect a proper regard of vets.)
But what of the fundamental wrongness of our invasion of Iraq (etc.)? I can see no practical way to separate those who join the military and are deployed by wise and good people from those who join the military and are deployed by unwise and (?) people. When one joins the military, our political system being what it is, one engages in a crapshoot. One cannot foresee good or bad leadership. In the end, there’s no getting around this: soldiers accept that they are tools for evil or good. (I’m not denying that there are times when a soldier should refuse to go along with the program. That capacity can and should be fostered, I think. But it can concern only clear cases of wrongness of judgment in wielding military power.)
And so, no, I would argue against withholding “care” and “benefits-from-gratitude” in the case of soldiers who fought in Iraq. (And how does one separate soldiers in Iraq from soldiers in Afghanistan? And isn’t a soldier’s assignment largely out of his/her hands?)
This has been my view since the early seventies, when young men returned from that awful and misbegotten war (most were drafted). Despite my opposition to that war, I always rejected transfer of our outrage about the war to soldiers and vets. I have always advocated regarding vets (who sacrifice—even when the military action was unfortunate and unwise) as among those we should take the greatest care to treat well.
That’s just a sketch. Terribly complex, this issue.
Any predictions on how the right wing anti-tax folks will handle this enormous subsidy? They like to throw the term "socialism" around with abandon, and it seems that, to some extent, subsidizing military personnel long after service with very generous benefits would upset them. They sure hate those pension plans, too, except for military applications, apparently.
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