Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper analyzes the impact of VA education benefits on educational attainment and enrollment of beneficiaries by examining the specific effects of the Post-9/11 GI Bill’s Yellow Ribbon Program. Existing scholarship studies the Post-9/11 GI Bill’s positive impact on benefit take-up rates, educational attainment, military recruiting, and retention among beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries since its adoption in 2008. The Yellow Ribbon Program is an important subsidiary of the Post-9/11 GI Bill that provides additional tuition subsidies, beyond the amounts guaranteed by the core benefit, to beneficiaries at participating institutions. The purpose of the program is to make private and out-of-state institutions more affordable for student veterans and other program beneficiaries. This study uses individual-level data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, collected in 2014 and 2015, and institution-level data from the 2014-2015 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to study the impact of Yellow Ribbon Program tuition subsidies on beneficiary enrollment at over 1,850 participating institutions. More specifically, the study uses these data sets to descry whether a higher proportion of subsidized tuition through the Yellow Ribbon Program, resulting in fewer out-of-pocket tuition expenses for individuals, increases the proportion of Post-9/11 GI Bill beneficiaries at a given institution. Relying on the results from multivariate regressions, this study aims to examine the impact of VA-sponsored tuition subsidies on the number of beneficiaries enrolled in a given institution. All of the institutions included in this study are Yellow Ribbon Program participants, with the proportion of beneficiary students at these schools acting as the dependent variable. Other independent regression variables predicted to impact beneficiary enrollment include: tuition costs, student demographics, an institution’s location, institution selectivity, and whether an institution specifically publishes its beneficiary tuition policies. I hypothesize that more generous Yellow Ribbon Program tuition subsidies will correlate with higher relative beneficiary populations at participating institutions. I also hypothesize that this relationship may be obscured among top-tier institutions, particularly for undergraduate student veterans, since financially-independent students receive generous need-based aid at many of these schools. As the Yellow Ribbon Program cost $185 million USD in 2015 alone, it is of the utmost policy importance to understand how and through which channels the program influences enrollment choices of program participants (US Department of Veterans Affairs 2018). This understanding can enhance the program’s effectiveness for employment opportunities, educational attainment, and livelihoods of veterans, service members, and their families.