Colleges gear up to serve GIs

Area colleges are scrambling to accommodate changes in benefits available for a new generation of military veterans, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reports. A Post-9/11 GI Bill took effect Aug. 1, which requires veterans to apply for its benefits before receiving benefits under the Wisconsin GI Bill. “Our benefits in Wisconsin have always been enough to cover the cost of public education, anyways — not necessarily private — and then some,” said Craig Destree, a UW-Green Bay student and vice president of the campus Vets 4 Vets club. “… The new GI Bill, I don’t think it necessarily changes, for most veterans, the financial landscape. It just kind of changes where the money is coming from.” Read article.

The vets story linked above was well-done, but the total numbers of vets at UW-Green Bay cited in the story might be a bit misleading. In fact, UW-Green Bay will have an unduplicated count of about 300 students (about 5 percent of total enrollment) receiving veterans benefits this coming fall. Of those, about 230 will be veterans and about 70 will be dependents of disabled veterans. The higher numbers in the story represent a combined total of veterans receiving benefits for the three semesters of an academic year (fall, spring and summer). So, some of those veterans may have been counted in the paper’s totals twice.