NATIONAL NEWS — In the latest attempt to deal with the
massive influx of veterans returning from Afghanistan
and Iraq,
President George W. Bush announced his nominee for Secretary of Veterans
Affairs on Oct. 30.
While this may or may not stimulate change at the Department
of Veterans Affairs and improve service for veterans, student veterans at UCSD
lack university support and have to deal with the federal government’s
bureaucracy.
UCSD’s services for veterans need to be drastically
improved, at least to levels that other colleges’ veterans enjoy.
Unlike San Diego State University and the San Diego Community
Colleges, UCSD does not have an office for veterans affairs.
Whereas other universities have dedicated sections of their
Web sites to veterans, all the available information for veterans is grouped
under the financial aid section of TritonLink.
“The school just sends you to the VA,” veteran and Earl
Warren College senior Ryan Matson said. “They don’t really offer anything. They
don’t even have a VA rep, although they do have a lady at the financial aid
office. Nobody really has a job specifically for dealing with veterans.”
Some veterans are fine with UCSD’s level of support. Veteran
and John Muir College senior Andrew Kleist, has few complaints about the system
as a whole, but even he acknowledged that the university offers very little
support for veterans.
“UCSD offers nothing, but personally I don’t particularly
care,” Kleist said. “The only thing I can think of for them to improve was that
it was difficult for me to find out what forms I needed at the beginning for
the GI Bill benefits. The information might be out there, but they should make
it easier to find.”
With many veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and
going to college for the first time, this lack of support is simply
unacceptable.
While some veterans do not want or need services beyond what
the school already provides, others do, and the school is failing its
obligation to veterans as long as a single one is unsatisfied. Though UCSD has
fewer veterans on campus than SDSU, our veterans are no less worthy than
theirs. Even UC Berkeley, a campus known for its antiwar leanings, has a
dedicated veterans service office.
“A lot of the junior colleges [around San Diego] have
veterans offices, and you can go straight to the office on campus,” Matson
said. “Here, they give you your paperwork, and then you have to file it
yourself.”
Denying veterans the same on-campus services that others
receive from other colleges spits in the face of their service and sacrifice,
as well as tarnishing UCSD’s reputation as a top-notch university. As a start,
the university could consider hiring more staff members for the Registrar’s and
Financial Aid Offices to provide veterans services instead of giving senior
administrators pay raises.
Creating a dedicated veterans services office with a staff
that doesn’t force veterans to wait three months for their paperwork to be
processed, like Matson did, is the very least the university can do.
Beyond merely ensuring that UCSD veterans can get their
benefits, the university can take many hints from the types of support that
neighboring colleges offer. For example, at SDSU, students who have service
obligations — such as being called up from the reserves — suffer no academic
penalties, can obtain refunds on textbooks and are eligible for other benefits
that help make the transition easier.
UCSD has no such policies, leaving veterans in the reserves
or with other extenuating circumstances at the mercy of the fourth-week drop
deadlines and standard withdrawal process.
Coming up with a sensible policy instead of leaving it to
the individual veteran to petition his or her case could spare both the
university and veterans needless hassle in the future.
UCSD also lacks an organization dedicated to student
veterans. An attempt by Matson and other student veterans to form a student
organization last year ended in failure because the school forces such
organizations to re-register every year.
According to Matson, currently the university provides no
method for veterans to get in contact with each other. While it would be daft
to grant only veterans a special exemption from the re-registration
requirement, the university could instead provide a way for veterans to easily
contact one another.
The services that the university should provide for veterans
are not unreasonable, especially considering that neighboring colleges already
do so.
There may be only a few veterans at UCSD, but they deserve
the best possible support.