President signs new GI Bill fix into law - Air Force tuition assistance, military tuition assistance, G.I. Bill, military friendly colleges - Air Force Times

President signs new GI Bill fix into law

President Obama signed a new law on Wednesday that provides temporary tuition and fee protection to private college students using the Post-9/11 GI Bill.

The law, effective Aug. 1, protects students who were enrolled or admitted into a private school before Jan. 4, 2011, from having tuition and fee payments reduced as long as they continue to be enrolled until they exhaust their 36 months of benefits.

Congress passed this protection as a modest fix to a previously enacted overhaul of the 2-year-old veterans' education program that sought to simplify how benefits are calculated.

One aspect of this change established a nationwide cap of $17,500 on annual tuition and fees for students at private colleges and universities, a limit that would have resulted in reduced benefits for an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 students who were enrolled in private schools for the previous term. This estimate is far lower than the 30,000 students that the Congressional Budget Office had earlier projected would be hurt by the new cap.

Identifying students who will be helped by the law will require hand-processing of some benefits claims, and in some cases could result in a review of already completed claims if students and schools filed claims and enrollment certification before the new law was signed.