Military spouse tuition program oversubscribed, shut down

McClatchy:

With her husband deployed in Iraq with a Stryker brigade from Washington state's Joint Base Lewis-McChord, 20-year-old Lauren Silva isn't your typical college student. But when it comes to finding money for tuition, books and other expenses, she's not so different.

Silva has scrambled to apply for scholarships and loans to pay for classes at the University of Washington-Tacoma , where she's a junior studying social work. She thought part of her financial problems were solved when she learned of a Defense Department program that pays military spouses $6,000 to help them with their education. Yet just as Silva prepared to apply earlier this year, the military abruptly shut the program down.

The Pentagon was overwhelmed by the number of applicants, which had grown from an average of about 10,000 a month to 70,000 in January alone as the nation's economy continued to sputter. Money for the Military Spouse Career Advancement Accounts program, known as MyCAA, was rapidly running out. Rather than ask Congress for more cash, Pentagon officials decided to close the program to new applicants and stop payments to those who were already enrolled.

"This was probably, in my view, a mistake," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee last week, adding that while he expected the program to resume, it eventually could end up costing $1 billion to $2 billion .

Gates said the Pentagon had budgeted $61 million for the program in the current fiscal year and had requested $65 million in the next fiscal year.

"This is one of those cases where we had a program that ramped up slowly and then it exploded in popularity," Gates said. "We are looking for a path forward."

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This is an example of how politicians over promise and under resource a program, and are then left to scramble to come up with more money. Shutting the program down without explanation merely compounded the problem. I tend to think it is a good program. I suggest they take the money out of the unspent stimulus money.