In news releases and ads, colleges love boasting they’re “military friendly” and “veteran friendly” and that isn’t just because veterans are usually good students and campus leaders.
It’s also because the newly expanded Post 9/11 GI Bill will pay colleges of all types around $9 billion this year to educate nearly 600,000 veterans, and virtually every school wants to expand its slice of that pie.
But some schools touting their spots on proliferating lists of “military friendly” colleges found in magazine guides and websites have few of the attributes educators commonly associate with the claim, such as accepting military credits or having a veteran’s organization on campus. Many are for-profit schools with low graduation rates.
The designations appear on rankings whose rigor varies but whose methods are under fire. Often, they’re also selling ads to the colleges. Some websites help connect military and veteran students with degree programs that may match their interests, but don’t disclose they are lead aggregators paid by the institutions often for-profit colleges whose programs they highlight.
“They’re not real rankings,” said Tom Tarantino, a veteran who is deputy policy director of the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “What they are is advertisement catalogues.” Labeling them “a huge problem,” he called for standards to be established for proper use of the term “military friendly” schools.
There are signs something like that may happen. But as with the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demand for signaling devices to help consumers shortcut complicated choices could make such lists tough to dislodge. Many experts say the lists are symptoms of a wider problem: Service members aren’t getting the advice they need to make sound decisions on using the substantially expanded education benefits. It’s no surprise businesses are stepping into that void.
At a large military education conference last month in Florida, some educators criticized the lists and pushed for a sharpened definition of “military friendly” colleges, to be developed either by the federal government or an education coalition called Service members Opportunity Colleges.
