Veterans Affairs and Defense Department officials have promised that in 2015 they will make available new information that could help troops and vets figure out which schools are the best values for their education benefits.
Such information could show whether for-profit schools subject to much criticism in recent years have been doing a worse job educating students who use tuition assistance and the GI Bill than public and nonprofit schools. Perhaps more importantly, military and vet students hunting for a school could see how well the particular colleges and universities have educated other students like them.
Such comparisons just haven’t been possible in the past. The standard measures used for schools look at the rates at which their students stay in school and graduate. But not only do those measures fail to provide military- or vet-specific data, they also completely exclude students who transfer credit or attend school part time, as many with military experience do.
VA and DoD’s new stats will take steps to not exclude such students and will have military- and vet-specific information.
In the case of VA, much of this information will be broken out by school, and will include data on graduation, rates of progress toward degrees, time it takes to earn a degree and number of schools attended per degree. That could be coming as soon as January.
DoD provided less detail on what information it will be releasing and when, but new data also is expected from them next year.
