At the start of the spring semester in January at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, a dozen military veterans waited for their GI Bill student benefit checks to show up. They waited, and waited some more, until the money finally arrived — in April.
By that time, three had left.
It typically takes weeks for veterans to receive GI Bill benefits from the Veterans Administration — funding used for tuition, textbooks and housing. But under the Trump administration it’s been taking at least three times longer, said Jeff Deickman, assistant director for veteran and military affairs on that campus.
Deickman’s counterparts at other colleges say the VA’s paperwork often has errors, causing further delays — and some student veterans are dropping out.
“I can spend, on bad days, three hours on the phone with the VA,” said Deickman, himself a 20-year Army veteran and a doctoral student. “They’ll only answer questions about one student at a time, so I have to hang up and start over again.”
Nearly 600,000 veterans received a total of about $10 billion worth of GI Bill benefits last year for education, according to the VA.
But Trump administration efforts to scale down the size of the VA by about 30,000 positions and to dismantle the Department of Education, which manages some student aid for veterans, have caused funding delays and are hampering students’ ability to understand and get answers about their education benefits, advocacy groups say.
“Part of the challenge of wrapping our arms around this is the opaqueness of the whole thing,” said Barmak Nassirian, vice president for higher education policy at Veterans Education Success. “We’re sort of feeling our way around the impact.”
Frustration mounting
“The whole process” has become a mess, said one 33-year-old Navy vet in Colorado, who asked that his name not be disclosed for fear of reprisal from federal authorities. “It’s making a lot of us anxious.”
Social media lays bare that anxiety and frustration. In posts, veterans complain about stalled benefits and mistakes.
“I just wish I could speak to someone who could help but all of the reps seem to be unable to assist and simply tell me to reapply, which I have 4x, just for another denial,” wrote one on Reddit, about attempts to have a student loan forgiven.
“Complete nightmare,” another Reddit poster wrote about the same process. “Delays, errors, and employees that don’t know anything. No one knows anything right now.”
Federal law guarantees that student loans of disabled vets will be forgiven. But some veterans with permanent disabilities have reported that their loan discharge applications were denied. One said the Department of Education followed up with a letter saying it was a mistake, but it took months to correct the error.
The Education Department did not respond to requests for comment. A VA spokesman, Gary Kunich, declined to answer even general questions about benefit delays unless The Hechinger Report provided the names of veterans and colleges that reported problems.
Nearly 17,000 VA employees had left the agency by June, according to a VA news release, and about 12,000 more are expected to leave by the end of September.
Vets struggle to get benefits
The VA disruptions threaten “access to veterans’ education benefits, just as even more veterans and service members may be turning to higher education and career training,” the American Council on Education, or ACE — the nation’s largest association of colleges and universities — wrote in June.
That’s on top of existing frustrations. Veterans already struggle to get the education benefits they’ve earned.
“Eligibility rules can be confusing,” ACE wrote, and are rife with “time-consuming red tape.” As a result, “many students and the institutions that serve them rely on VA staff to interpret the rules, resolve disputes, and ensure benefits are processed on time. With fewer staff, that support system is at risk of breaking down.”
Student Veterans of America, one of the largest advocacy organizations, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Ten colleges and universities with the largest veteran enrollments in the nation — including San Diego State, Georgia State, Angelo State, Arizona State and Syracuse — also did not respond to, or declined to answer, questions.
Veterans and advocates also are concerned that Education Department cuts could erode oversight of the primarily for-profit colleges that take GI Bill benefits. Veterans are twice as likely to attend those colleges as other students, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute.
The risk is particularly high for low-income veterans and those from diverse backgrounds, said Lindsay Church, executive director of Minority Veterans of America. Those student veterans are less likely to come from college-educated households, Church said, making them more vulnerable to fraud.
Delays and errors
But the most immediate problems are payment delays and paperwork errors, student veterans and their advisors said.
In the military city of San Diego, where thousands of former and current service members go to college, student veterans at Miramar College this year waited months to hear about VA work-study contracts, which previously had been approved within days.
The contracts allow students to get paid for veteran-related jobs while attending school, said LaChaune DuHart, the school’s director of veterans affairs and military education.
Others went weeks without textbooks because of delayed VA payments, DuHart said.
“A lot of students can’t afford to lose those benefits,” she said, describing the rage many student veterans expressed over the long wait times this year. Some drop out.
“A lot of times it’s that emotional reaction that causes these students not to come back to an institution,” she said.
Several recounted stories of veterans without degrees choosing to look for work rather than continue their education because of frustration with the VA — even though studies show that graduating from college can dramatically increase future earnings.
Those who stay face the added stress of waiting for their benefits, or not being able to get their questions answered.
“We always tell them to be prepared for delays,” said Phillip Morris, an associate professor of education research and leadership at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who studies student veterans. “But if you can’t pay your rent because your benefits are not flowing the way you’re expecting them to, that’s increasing anxiety and stress that translates to the classroom.”
Krupnick wrote this story for the The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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