Military Spouse Tuition Payments Stop Abruptly Then Start Up Again

Military Spouse Tuition Payments Stop Abruptly Then Start Up

In February the military spouse student aid program called MyCAA, or Money for the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts Program stopped abruptly. It has started up again after pressure that was put on the Pentagon from politicians and people in the military, but new applications are not being accepted.

The program was conceived supposedly to provide skills for

military spouses such that they could more easily find employment at different locations in the event that the military member was transferred to a new duty assignment. $6,000 per applicant was being paid, and the Pentagon budgeted $61 million last year for the program and asked for a slight increase to $65 million this year. At $61 million this translates into a little of 10,000 people in the program for the year.

If you ever think you just want to leave planning about the economy or things that affect your daily life up to the government, consider this. In January 2010 alone there were 70,000 applications for this program. The average prior to that was 10,000 per month which is still a rate of over 10 times what the military planners expected.

Being wrong by orders of magnitude is one thing, but the way the situation was handled after that is even more revealing. The military just stopped the program. They didn’t send letters to the people involved and inform them that the program was being curtailed, they just ended it. Some people who were enrolled in the program happened to learn about its ending by seeing comments on facebook. So people who had taken the trouble to apply for college or trade school and started the program were suddenly left holding an empty bag.

As mentioned above, there were groups of military spouses who got together and complained to politicians who in turn put pressure on the Pentagon and exposed the errors in both the way this program was conceived and administered and the way it was abruptly terminated. So the reaction of the military was to continue paying for the people who were already enrolled in the program but to stop accepting new applicants. It looks like the military will have to pay several billion dollars per year to continue with this program, which is about 20-30 times what they originally thought it would cost.

The shame of this is that they will not spending money that the government has- the government is already operating on huge deficits. So this will add a few billion dollars more to the deficit that will have to be paid by future generations, and a few billion more in deficits is chump change in today’s world. If the government’s handling of this small program is any indication, there are a lot more surprises in store with the huge health care bill that was passed recently.