Few people understand the meaning of lifelong learning better than a veteran does. I can’t speak from experience, but I wonder if it often feels to a soldier as though one’s real education begins not on the first day of basic training, but somewhere in the first tour of duty. It must seem trite to say it, but maybe this is one reason why military veterans often become higher education’s most motivated students. Few people understand the value of the future better than a veteran does.

Maybe this is also why online degree programs are often a good education match for veterans. It isn’t just the convenience of being able to take classes from virtually anywhere in the world. Many veterans have written about the weird feeling of being in a campus classroom with students the same age and feeling a hundred years older than they—and finding all the ordinariness unreal. For those veterans, it’s probably a relief to take classes at a distance rather than in a campus lecture hall.

On Veterans Day, four veterans published an eloquent editorial in The Huffington Post expressing their frustration and disappointment with inconsistent benefit policies found in the Post-9/11 GI Bill. The problem the authors identified is a housing stipend policy that essentially penalizes veterans in online degree programs for taking classes, well, online.

Read the whole excellent article here: New G.I Bill Still Lags Behind the Times, by Eric Baylor, CTR2(SW), John J. Cronin, USMC/RET., Margaret Varela, and Kenneth Wilson.

The article quoted some eye-catching Department of Defense statistics about military service members and online education programs:

• More than 387,000 active duty military are studying online
• 60% of all soldiers who take classes
• In 2007, 31,000 veterans enrolled in school were at online institutions
• 6 of the top 25 universities serving veterans are online institutions

Over the last month, 3 pieces of legislation have been filed in the House of Representatives to help reconcile the discrepancies in the Post-9/11 GI Bill. Among the fixes is a proposal to provide equivalent housing funding to veterans in both campus and online degree programs.