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Veterans have discovered a costly hole in the GI Bill’s promise of a free education for those who have served in the military.

Hawaii is one of 29 states that require students to reside locally for a year before they become eligible for in-state tuition, which is $8,400 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The GI Bill covers the entire in-state tuition amount per academic year at public universities, and as much as $18,077 at private universities.

But out-of-state tuition at UH Manoa is $23,232, which means that vets on the GI Bill will need to find another $5,155 to pay for their education during the year when they are gaining residency.

Twenty-one states resolve this dilemma for veterans by waiving the residency requirement, but Hawaii does not.

A Soldier’s Story

Raymond Banda, who grew up in Texas, was deployed four times over the course of his 10-year military career before being discharged in December 2011. “I loved what I did, it was fast-paced and I enjoyed it, but after these two wars and deployments, it really wears soldiers down mentally, physically and emotionally,” Banda recounts.

But Banda found himself virtually unemployable in the civilian job market. Yes, the military provided him with diverse work experience, but prospective employers were looking for a college degree that he didn’t have. While in search of a job, he lived off of savings from his time in the military.

It was, he says, “almost impossible” to avoid going into debt.

After some temporary construction-related employment in Las Vegas and a stint when he was a little lost and drinking too much, he turned his life around. He decided to come back to Hawaii, where he had been stationed, to enroll in UH Manoa 2012, “but because I was out of the state for longer than a month while moving across the country looking for employment, I was no longer considered a Hawaii resident.”

As an out-of-state student, he faced a bill that was thousands of dollars more than the GI Bill covers. He couldn’t afford it. He ended up applying to the far-cheaper Leeward Community College.

The UH’s Response

At Leeward, Banda is now a co-founder of the non-profit Hawaii Alliance of Student Veterans, which advocates for Hawaii’s student veterans. He, along with another student veteran leader Pili Williams, testified before the Board of Regents on Oct. 18 at UH. Their goal was to amend the tuition rules to allow non-resident veterans to pay in-state tuition rates throughout the UH system, and eventually in all universities in the state.

“We must address these critical issues and allow veterans to succeed in Higher Education,” Williams testified, “not because we deserve it, because we earned it.”

The university’s chancellor, Tom Apple, told Civil Beat that he supports their effort. “They put their life on the line for us … I’d love to see it come to fruition.”

Apple notes that it is ultimately up to the Board of Regents to decide. He expects a proposal to reach the board next spring.

“I think we owe it to the veterans. Our veterans have put their life on the line for us so that we can have the freedom we have; that’s the kind of culture I want from the university,” Apple said.

There are ways around paying the school costs that the GI bill doesn’t cover. The Yellow Ribbon Program reimburses participating schools for some of the additional fees that student veterans incur, and some schools in Hawaii have joined this program, but UH Manoa only offers the program to 15 graduate students. University of Hawaii West-Oahu offers it to all undergraduate students. Schupp says that this isn’t a satisfying solution because it affects relatively few students.

University of Hawaii Interim President David Lassner said in a conference in September that there is a plan to create a task force that would make recommendations about how all campuses could be more supportive of veterans who are students.

Financial Benefits

Advocates argue that by waiving the out-of-state tuition rate for non-resident veterans, universities might end up making more money. This is because more students would choose to enroll in the expensive four-year campuses as opposed to the cheaper community colleges where many now go.

The findings are based on these numbers:

• Number of vets in Hawaii: 12,227
• UH Manoa in-state tuition: $4,200 (per semester)
• UH Manoa out-of-state tuition: $11,616 (per semester)
• Honolulu Community College in-state tuition: $1,212 (per semester)
• Honolulu Community College out-of-state tuition: $3,552 (per semester)

Of the 12,277 veterans in Hawaii, 428 are enrolled at UH Manoa. If 5 percent of students paid out-of-state tuition, UH Manoa would receive $3.15 million in total federal tuition dollars from the Department of Veterans Affairs from in-state, and $497,000 from out-of-state tuition.

This shows what the financial impact would be if 25 percent of Honolulu Community College student veterans transferred to UH Manoa:

• Number of vets at Manoa: 428
• Percent of HCC vets that would transfer to Manoa: 25 percent
• Number of HCC vets that would transfer to Manoa: 50
• Total tuition from in-state vets: $3,595,200
• Total tuition from out of state vets: $0
• Total tuition from HCC transfer vets: $420,000
• Total tuition using in state tuition: $4,015,200

Numbers show that if UH Manoa allows in-state tuition rates for all veterans, and if 25 percent of veterans who chose a community college because of the lower tuition transferred or chose UH Manoa, there would be an initial increase of almost $100,000 in total tuition in one school year.

Over three years, the student veteran population could allow for an increased student veteran population of 25 percent, from 428 to 535; this would lead to an increase of $581,395 in tuition dollars.

Education as a Lifesaver

John Schupp, the creator and director of the (SERV) at Cleveland State University, became involved with veterans tuition issues in 2006 when he began to consider why student veterans encounter problems in their academic careers. Vietnam veterans told him, “John, we aren’t stupid. We just couldn’t concentrate. Then we dropped out. We hated it because we couldn’t succeed. We don’t know why we couldn’t concentrate.”

Military men and women are trained to be observant and invested in their environment, Schupp explains, which is why, when they were in classrooms, they were more aware of what was going on around them than their assignments. He wanted to create conditions in which student veterans could succeed.

Without full access to free education, a lot of vets won’t be able to study, Schupp says, and some will have a harder time re-integrating and preparing for the future.

“That’s why in-state tuition is so important,” he says.

He believes that Hawaii has a responsibility to its military to ensure that they can get the education they have earned by creating classes that can transition them to stateside and mainland universities.

Schupp adds that students at community colleges, which vets like Banda choose for the lower cost, are generally very young and fresh out of high school. “Veterans don’t want to go to community colleges. They want to go to a university because it’s an older crowd. They can’t deal with it, the younger campus.”

“In my opinion, your education is always what you make out of it,” Banda says, adding that, “it would be more beneficial in my mind to have gone to Manoa, because you get exposed to so much more and have more resources at your fingertips and they have many other programs at their campus.”

But Banda believes his future would have been bleak without some form of college education. And next year, he intends to enroll at UH Manoa. “Without my education, I’d probably still be going down the road of drinking. Worst case scenario, I would be one of those veterans on the side of the road with the cardboard sign saying ‘I need your money.’”