When student-veteran Travis Lynn returned to school at the end of his contract with the Marines, he saw it as a second chance.
The third-year mechanical engineering student now attends UCLA and is one of many student-veterans who receive monetary benefits from the GI Bill.
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, was passed by Congress after World War II to help soldiers to assimilate back into civilian life, according to the U.S., Department of Veterans Affairs Web site. The law was intended to provide for education, training and loan guarantees for homes and businesses, as well as unemployment pay for returning veterans.
Both Lynn and fellow UCLA student-veteran Jason Kolons are part of a nationwide increase of veterans returning to college through the GI Bill. According to the Associated Press, the number of college-bound veterans this fall is expected to increase 30 percent from last year to nearly half a million.
Lynn’s experience with the GI Bill began even before he returned to civilian life. A five-year veteran, Lynn originally attended Purdue University in Indiana after he graduated from high school in 1998, but later dropped out.
“I didn’t feel that it was right,” he said.
As a result, Lynn decided to give military service a try and signed up for the U.S. Marines.
Lynn was deployed overseas twice and spent time in Iraq, and also participated in training exercises in Dubai, Bahrain and Somalia.
However, Lynn began to regret his decision to leave college.
“From the moment I left, I knew I wanted to go back,” he said, adding that this feeling became more pronounced throughout his time in the military.
During boot camp, Lynn said that the military gave detailed information about the GI Bill to soldiers.
Lynn said that they emphasized the chance to sign up for the program and that the best way that the soldiers could use it was to go to school.
So Lynn signed up and after his contract with the Marines ended, he attended Moorpark College for two years before transferring to UCLA.
He said that the monetary benefits that he receives from the bill are helpful, as his family is not extremely wealthy.
“It’s an extra $1,300 a month,” he said, adding that the money helps to pay for daily living expenses. “And after August, it’ll pay for things that I used loans for.”
Lynn is referring to the new Post-9/11 GI Bill, which was updated in 2008 and gives veterans enhanced educational benefits after it goes into effect in August.
These benefits include a tuition and fees payment equivalent to that of the most expensive state institution of higher learning, a monthly housing allowance based on the military’s basic allowance for housing in the area in which the veteran attends school, and an annual book stipend of approximately $1,000, according to the Web site.
However, these benefits may not be the same for every veteran and the amount of benefits received is dependent on a veteran’s years of service, time spent in combat, and if he or she was injured, said Tina Oakland, director of the Veterans Resource Office at the Center for Women and Men.
However, Kolons had a very different experience with the GI Bill.
Kolons, a third-year mechanical engineering student, joined the military in similar fashion and his six-year military career began in August 1998, when he enlisted in the army after attending Saddleback College for a brief period.
At the beginning of his contract, Kolons was deployed to Kosovo, where he took part in peacekeeping operations between ethnic Albanians and Serbians.
“We had to protect one group from the other,” he said. “We would patrol from town to town.”
Kolons saw further action after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
“We saw the towers fall and realized that everything had changed,” he said. He was then sent to Afghanistan, where his unit searched through caves and provided security for other special forces.
Prior to the end of his contract, Kolons was deployed to Iraq, where he stayed for a year.
“I didn’t know what to do with my life,” Kolons said. “I thought the best thing to do was to join the military.”
Kolons decided to become an infantry soldier because he thought it would be “pretty easy” and became part of the 1st Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment.
When he returned home from Iraq in February 2004, he began to look for a job and settled on the career goal of becoming a mechanical engineer, eventually returning to his junior college.
That same year, Kolons reaped the benefits from the GI Bill that he had signed up for during his military service.
With the monthly allotments of funds that he received, as well as the financial aid that he received from his junior college, Kolons’ tuition was paid for and his only educational expenses were for books.
But after he transferred to UCLA, the situation changed.
Due to the higher cost of fees at the university, Kolons had to apply for loans and scholarships to cover his student fees and daily living expenses. Although he continued to receive monthly payments from the GI Bill, the amount was not enough and he took a job with his then-girlfriend’s father to bring in extra revenue.
The situation worsened during fall quarter, when Kolons realized that his GI Bill was exhausted.
Kolons said that when a soldier signs up for the program, he or she is guaranteed 36 months of payments, after which the recipient will no longer collect regular funding.
As a result, he was forced to find another way to pay his fees and eventually applied for a fee waiver from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, based on his status as a disabled veteran.
Since he receives this waiver, he has decided not to sign up for the Post-9/11 GI Bill.
“(The GI Bill) helped a little, but not to the extent that it should have,” Kolons said. “It was limited.”