/// EDUCATION
Want American Veterans Magazine delivered to your home oR office?
has had the opposite effect. I’ve had potential employers kind of scoff at it. For-profit colleges like DeVry were long incentivized to recruit veterans due to regulations requiring them to generate 10% of revenue from non-DOE sources. G.I. Bill funds could contribute to this quota until recently. ‘DOESN’T MEAN SHIT’ DeVry enrolls 80,000 students and has a campus in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where Stutesman was stationed. Stutesman is one of countless veterans hoping to see his G.I. Bill benefits restored for a second chance at an education. He wants to pursue a tech certificate at Western Governors University, an online college with a clean track record, but he can’t afford to take on any more debt, he said in an interview. It’s uncertain how many eligible veterans would even use the benefits if they were restored. In 2018, after benefits were reinstated for veterans affected by college closures, only 1 in 5 eligible applicants applied within nine months. But rest assured anyone involved with Veterans Education Success would cherish their second chance if offered one. That number grows, literally, by the day. Just ask Adam Young, that aspiring video game developer from Gilbert. You know, the husband and father who loves his superhero posters. Those heroes aren’t real. But American heroes, like him, are very real. You wouldn’t think an experience in a virtual classroom can be so uncomfortable it overshadows the trauma of war. Yet, somehow, Young says his military service in Iraq “changed my life in many ways, for the better.” And of his degree from Full Sail University? “It doesn’t mean shit.”
junk,” Carter said. “I am unable to get my G.I. Bill Benefits restored, and I will never get back the time I spent.” In 2020, Caldwell University paid a $5 million settlement after U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Craig Carpenito accused it of overcharging veterans for bogus courses and defrauding the U.S. Government out of more $24 million through the Post-9/11 Veterans Education Assistance Act. In 2022, Retail Ready Career Center in Garland, Texas, reimbursed more than $137 million to student veterans. KILL BILL Most veterans who fritter away their G.I. Bill benefits to online diploma mills kiss their dollar bills goodbye forever, according to Veterans Education Success. The university either shuts down or goes bankrupt before any meaningful oversight, or it merely keeps getting away with it. You don’t have to leave Phoenix to find examples of each. In the example of ITT Technical Institute and its campus in West Phoenix, the school went belly-up in 2016 before it could allay students like Stephanie Pollay, an Air Force veteran who attended ITT in-person and online after her service ended in 2003. For six years, she doled out money without learning anything about her field. All the while, unbeknownst to her, the school was accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, which was stripped of its authority after several rounds of scrutiny by the DOE. “I had been scammed,” Pollay said. “My credit was ruined, I can’t get my G.I. Bill back and I lost an entire decade of my life struggling with the damage this caused.” In the other example, DeVry University in Phoenix’s North Mountain Village might be the school most associated with churning out online diplomas (and the butt of many jokes) — look at satirist Tré Melvin’s 2014 sketch, “You went to DeVry, or you logged into DeVry? There’s a difference.” Army National Guard veteran David Thibodeau used up his G.I. Bill and has $86,000 in outstanding student loans after studying video game programming at DeVry. In five years of study, he never once had a one-on-one conversation with an instructor. He works the same job he had before he attended DeVry. “While I did graduate and get my degree, it has not helped me,” Thibodeau said in a March email to American Veterans Magazine . “If anything, it
and CEO Andrew Clark resigned and took a $3 million severance payout. “The University of Arizona is not responsible for the actions of Ashford University,” university spokesperson Pam Scott said in a statement. UofA President Robert Robbins contested the payback plan in a meeting with Arizona congressmen on Capitol Hill last year. Ex-Ashford University recruiter and whistleblower Eric Dean said, like Stutesman, he was told to enroll veterans “no matter what,” and keep them on the hook for at least three weeks until they were no longer eligible for a refund. Mirroring Stutesman’s experience as a recruiter at another Arizona for-profit university, Dean said he was “throwing fellow veterans under the bus” by “relating to them, gaining their trust and taking advantage of their trust.” In 2022, UAGC lost its G.I. Bill funding. Gov. Katie Hobbs denigrated the Arizona Board of Regents in February, saying the board members “failed in their oversight role.” She decisively told reporters, “It is crystal clear that the handling of the University of Arizona crisis is heading in the wrong direction.” SCHOOL LIES For-profit online colleges have a track record of leaving veterans broke and unemployable. Many like Ashford University are gobbled up by large public universities before they have the chance to atone and turned into “global” campuses, so the parent university doesn’t have to build an online campus from scratch. In 2018, Purdue University bought the for-profit Kaplan University, mired in a false claims lawsuit and under scrutiny from Congress, to create Purdue Global. In 2019, Colorado Technical University paid $30 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges it used deceptive marketing to recruit students. “You can’t skirt the law by outsourcing illegal conduct to your service providers,” FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Andrew Smith said. The university is still profitable and markets aggressively to veterans online. Navy veteran and single mother Cheri Carter testified in February to the DOE she didn’t realize Colorado Tech’s medical billing and coding program wasn’t accredited until two weeks before she graduated. “I couldn’t believe it. I had spent 14 months in an expensive program, and it turned out to be total
MY CREDIT WAS RUINED, I CAN’T GET MY G.I. BILL BACK AND I LOST AN ENTIRE DECADE OF MY LIFE STRUGGLING WITH THE DAMAGE THIS CAUSED. “
STEPHANIE POLLAY, AIR FORCE VETERAN ”
www.AmVetsMag.com/Subscribe
Don’t miss the SPECIAL SECTION on veteran suicide in our next edition.
30
31
AMERICAN VETERANS Summer 2024
Summer 2024 AMERICAN VETERANS
Powered by FlippingBook