Obama Signs Order to Protect Veterans From College Recruiters
At Georgia’s Fort Stewart on Friday, President Obama signed an executive order to help protect military families and veterans from aggressive and deceptive recruiting by higher education institutions — especially for-profit colleges — seeking their military benefits.
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The executive order will require colleges to provide more information about their student outcomes and financial aid, create a centralized complaint system and direct the Veterans Administration to trademark the term “G.I. Bill” to make it harder for colleges to create Web sites resembling official government sites or falsely suggest that they offer special access to veterans’ benefits.
“I’ve heard the stories,” the president said. “They harass you into making a quick decision with all those calls and e-mails. And if they can’t get you online, they show up on post. One of the worst examples of this is a college recruiter who had the nerve to visit a barracks at Camp Lejeune and enroll Marines with brain injuries — just for the money. These Marines had injuries so severe some of them couldn’t recall what courses the recruiter had signed them up for.”
Mr. Obama promised to “bring an end to the aggressive — and sometimes dishonest — recruiting” by increasing oversight, strengthening the rules about who can come on post to talk to service members, and making it easier to file complaints.
A loophole in federal law creates a strong incentive for aggressive recruiting of veterans by for-profit colleges. In an effort to ensure that the education provided is valuable enough that some students will pay part of the costs out of pocket, the “90/10 rule” requires that for-profit colleges get at least 10 percent of their revenues from a private source. But veterans’ and military benefits count toward that 10 percent, making service members especially valuable for the publicly traded for-profit college companies that get nearly 90 percent of their revenue from federal student aid.