G.I. Bill and Distance Ed

Please forgive the above msg without any comment. What I intended to comment on was the comment that the poster's spouse would have used up her TA when she graduates this year. By this I assume that you mean she will have reached her air force cap of the amount they will allow her to use this FY. In the Navy, the service with which I am familiar, TA is paid at a rate of 75% not to exceed 250.00 per semester unit or a max payment of 187.50 per unit, leaving the member to pay the remaining 25%. There is a new program, called MGIB TA top up, which allows your wife to recoup all money paid for TA after 1 Nov 2000 when the law changed by filing an initial application for GI Bill benefits (VA Form 22-1990) and enclosing copies of the TA paperwork dated on and after 1 November 2000. See www.gibill.va.gov under news for information and procedures.

The Navy caps TA at $3500 per FY, which is what I suspect may be uniform in DoD. As far as using the GI Bill on active duty, anything less than half time is essentially a tuition reimbursement procedure, but as has been pointed out, the amount paid is limited to a formula determined by the VA. Your spouse should call 1-888-442-4551 for further information.

 

I spoke with an advisor at ACCIS and found out that by the end of the month, ACCIS will qualify for the GI bill.

Therefore, if the DETC and the US dept of defense recognises ACCIS, thier *program* must have been checked out very well. Kind of tips the scales towards ACCIS' side.

 

Moreover, in order to have RA accredation, I was told that you have to have a campus. Since ACCIS is distance education only, RA accredation will not happen due to ACCIS' online learning nature.

Can we, today, use past guidlines to measure quality? That would give an unfair advantage to older institutions that already have buildings/campuses but who's distance learning program may not be as good.

RA accredation means the school has a campus. All non campus schools, those that will probably develope with the e learning revolution will inherently never get RA accredation. So how can you judge them?

 

Please don't tell this to Jones International University, which is the first internet-based university to receive regional accreditation. Or Northcentral University, which is trying to follow. Or the schools that award degrees by distance and independent study with only administrative offices: Excelsior, COSC, TESC, Union Institute, Fielding, Walden, Capella, and on, and on, and on.

Who said this? I hope it wasn't a representative of ACCIS, because that would be disingenuous. The reason(s) ACCIS is DETC-accredited instead of regionally accredited could be many. The most likely answer is that they're unaccreditable by the Southern Association (hardly a hardy supporter of distance education itself!).

Rich Douglas

 

A representative of ACCIS told me. That is why I came to the conlusion that thier accreditation could not possibly be validated by regional accredation.

 

Quite a few less-than-wonderful schools claim that accreditation from a recognized agency is available only to campus-based schools. I've been so told by a representative from Bienville ... when I told her that Internet-only Jones International was accredited by a regional association, she was flustered.

It's disturbing to see ACCIS saying the same thing -- doesn't speak well for the knowledge and training of their representatives, at the least.


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Kristin Evenson Hirst
DistanceLearn.About.com