The changes to the Army's tuition assistance program include the following:
-Must wait one full year after completion of AIT to utilize Federal Tuition Assistance
-Can only take 16 semester hours per year
-Must wait 10 years to begin graduate courses
This will greatly affect the 563,200 Reserve & National Guard soldiers who depend on this program to pay for their education. This includes thousands of ROTC cadets in the Simultaneous Membership Program.
These changes will strip benefits away from soldier-students who enlisted in order to take advantage of this opportunity. There is great potential for this to cause tens of thousands of soldier-students to delay or forego their college education due to financial hardship - the same hardship that they enlisted to avoid.