Fayetteville Observer: Hagan Wants Military Education Program Restored, Expanded

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www.fayobserver.com

Paul Woolverton

The Defense Department last week announced plans to revive a popular program that helps military spouses pay for career training and college tuition.

But the reactivated program - Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts, or MyCAA - has significant new restrictions and offers less money than before. That upsets U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan, a North Carolina Democrat.

In a letter dated Wednesday to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Hagan says the new restrictions should be lifted and, ultimately, the program should be expanded to help more spouses than could take advantage of it before.

"For thousands of military spouses in North Carolina, the MyCAA has been an important tool for the skills needed for portable careers," Hagan said in an interview Wednesday with The Fayetteville Observer and The News & Observer newspapers.

"As the service members move around, the spouses ... many of them want to work and need educational help for their career path," she said. "I believe that North Carolina's the most military-friendly state in the nation, and it's incredibly important to me that both our military personnel and their families have the support they need."

The MyCAA program started in November 2007 to help the spouses of junior service members get training in a limited number of fields. It widened in March 2009 to the spouses of all ranks, and they could be enrolled in all programs of study, a July 20 Department of Defense release says.

It offered the spouses up to $6,000 for the expenses of obtaining a licensure, certificate or associate's degree. It was intended to help them get the skills needed to more easily find work in new communities as the military moves the families to new assignments.

The program proved so popular that it nearly ran out of money in February. The Defense Department shut it down, leaving more than 136,000 people in a bind.

The Defense Department resumed the program in March for its prior enrollees and evaluated how to keep it going.

Last week, the Defense Department announced that MyCAA will take on new clients beginning Oct. 25, but with major restrictions.

The new lifetime benefit will be capped at $4,000 instead of the old cap of $6,000.

While the old MyCAA was open to spouses of personnel of all ranks, the revived MyCAA is limited to spouses of the junior ranks - pay grades of E-1 to E-5 (private to sergeant in the Army), W-1 to W-2 (lower-ranked warrant officers) and O-1 to O-2 (second lieutenant and first lieutenant in the Army).

The Defense Department says more than 363,000 spouses will be eligible for the program.

According to Hagan's office, the Department of Defense estimates the old program would have cost more than $1 billion to maintain in the upcoming fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1. The revived program is estimated at $250 million in the first year, and $190 million in the following years.

"We want to help people be employed, but at the same time we have to be cost conscious," said Defense Undersecretary Clifford Stanley in the July 20 release.

Despite the cuts, Stanley said the program still provides a valuable benefit.

"We are doing the best we can with what we have - I wish we had a lot more money, but we don't - but this glass is still half-full," he said.

The program will have added career and education counseling services intended to help those ineligible for MyCAA money find other scholarships and grants, Stanley said.

Hagan argued in her letter that the MyCAA program should be kept open to the spouses of all ranks and that the lifetime benefit cap should not have been cut to $4,000.

Hagan also wants to expand the program to include spouses pursuing bachelor's and master's degrees. Many professions that a spouse might pursue, such as teaching, nursing and accounting, require those types of degrees, Hagan said.

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