Congressman Martin Heinrich was not on campus Friday to speak. He was there to listen.
Heinrich met with student veterans and representatives of the UNM Veterans Resource Center to gather information on scholarship programs for Veterans.
Andres Lazo, an undergraduate student veteran, said he’s confident Heinrich will address the issues faced by student veterans in New Mexico.
“I really felt like representative Heinrich was here to listen, and that’s a big deal because, you know, when they listen to you, they really know that you’re important,” he said.
At the end of the meeting, Heinrich said he gained a lot of useful information and ideas to help improve access to scholarship programs for veterans.
“I wrote down a bunch of things that we’re going to go through and see if any of those make sense for either legislative initiatives, or just things we can do out of our office,” he said.
Heinrich said the veterans he spoke with at the meeting told him they often aren’t aware of the benefits available to them.
“One of the things I got out of this is that there are a lot of folks out there who have earned benefits through their service to this country — who don’t even necessarily know about this — that there’s oftentimes no standardized way that they find out what the benefits that they’ve earned are,” he said. “We need to do a better job of connecting with folks.”
Elise Wheeler, director of the UNM Veterans Resource Center, said there are two principle funding options available to veterans: the Chapter 33 Post-9/11 GI Bill for undergraduates and Yellow Ribbon GI Education Enhancement Program for graduate students.
The Chapter 33 bill pays for up to 100 percent of undergraduate studies, depending on how much time a person spent in the service, Wheeler said. In order to be eligible for the Yellow Ribbon scholarship, a student needs to qualify for 100 percent of the Chapter 33 bill, she said.
Wheeler said there will be 25 Yellow Ribbon scholarships available for the 2010-11 school year. Five of these will go to students studying law, five to students at the Anderson Graduate School and 15 for general graduate studies.
The Veterans Resource Center is working to gain funding for a veterans’ lounge and a veterans’ peer-mentoring program on campus, which would help veterans take advantage of the resources available to them, she said, but the Center’s representatives are still working out those details.
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“The veterans’ lounge and the peer-mentoring programs are very important to helping vets transition and stay in school,” she said. “The lounge would give them a safe haven where they’re no longer different than everyone around them, as they are in the general population because of their experiences. The peer mentoring will help reacquaint them with academic processes, which can be very confusing if you’ve been out for a while.”
Heinrich gave one concrete idea for immediately improving the number of veterans who know about the scholarships. He said his office created a manual for veterans, detailing the resources available to them, and the meeting gave him an idea for how to distribute it more widely.
“Our veterans’ guide we put together in our office is a big PDF, and the Veterans Resource Center has the e-mails of all the people who’ve come in and signed up for their help,” he said. “We could be e-mailing that to every one of those folks, and then they have the resource guide in their e-mail.”
VETERANS SCHOLARSHIPS, BY THE NUMBERS:
: approximate number of people using veterans scholarships at UNM.
: number of months of active service or activated reserve time needed to qualify for full Chapter 33 benefits.
: percent of tuition the Chapter 33 bill will pay for a person who fully qualifies.
: number of graduate students using Post-9/11 GI Bill scholarships
: number of graduate students at UNM eligible for Yellow Ribbon scholarship
: number of available positions for Yellow Ribbon graduate scholarships at UNM for the 2010-11 school year. UNM pays for half of each scholarship, and the VA covers the rest.
: approximate figure for how much more a year Anderson Graduate School costs, compared to undergraduate studies.
: number of Yellow Ribbon spots for Anderson Graduate School scholarships, out of the 25 possible.
