Our daughter is starting her senior year in high school. I’m not sure if one of the service academies is even an option at this point. How about ROTC? What type of financial help is available and what commitments are involved?
Hey, regardless what the President says, the war on everything is going badly and likely going to get worse and recruiters for the services are not meeting their quotas. If your daughter is a senior in high school and has any grades at all and shows intrest, you’ll have to beat recruiters off with a stick. They’ll promise you anything that you want even the moon and the stars. :rolleyes: You can trust Uncle Sam to give you anything you want and he will never ask for more than you are willing to give. :dubious:
I would speak with a Recruiter they can tell you how it works & how much the services pay. I would verify what you are told on-line and with another recruiter. (People as people make mistakes and have different communication styles) I would do this in person and not by phone.
To ballpark it: In the Army depending on how long you enlist with the Army and the job you choose, you can get up to $71,424 to help pay for college. ( you have to give $100 a month during your first year of service).
It is not too late to apply for your daughter to apply to the Naval Academy
To clarify a little… daughter has excellent grades and we’re not interested in military first with promises of college/med school help later. I assume it is possible to get help on the education side first by promising to fulfill a military obligation later in the service. Possibly loans that would be forgiven?
A friend of mine got the Navy to pay for here complete med school and the like. She joined NROTC her sophomore year in college, did basic and OCS during the summers. Went to med school, and when she got out was a navy doctor for 8 years. Did her internship and residency at San Diego, which meant no emergency room shifts or that crap. Navy paid for everything, so she entered private practice with zero debt.
I’m not fully juiced on my coffee yet, so I may not be reading your desires correctly, but I think a service academy may be an option in line with your post: college up front, with a military obligation after graduation - not the other way around. The CG Academy in New London offers a (sort of) free 4 year college, and upon graduation, the newly minted Ensigns have a 5 year obligation to the service. Some details from the above link:
That may not be what you’re after, but I thought I’d throw it out there just in case.
Please don’t have ANY expectation that her future miitary obligation will be “forgiven”.
Please don’t have ANY expectation that her “term of enlistment” will be honored. The military is not discharging many soldiers at the end of their enlistment in what it considers “critical” specialties, and most medical specialties would be among them. They are even recalling soldiers who served their time and got out some time ago.
To go any father about whether this idea will work for her or not would be venturing into the realm of opinion, so I won’t.
I agree with the above posters who said to talk to a recruiter and then verify everything you hear. And I’m surprised you aren’t getting calls already!
I will tell you what my husband did, to give you one option, although he joined 13years ago, so it could be different… He joined the National Guard while still a senior in high school (January to be exact). Until the end of the school year he went to his once a month weekend drill. He only lived about 40 minutes from where his unit drilled, so that made it easy. Oh, and since this is the Guard, other states may do things differently as well.
Then he left partway through the summer after graduation, and did Basic Training, AIT, and Jump School. He was gone maybe 9 months or so all total, so missed 2 semesters at college. So he started his freshman year when I started my sophomore year (we are the same age). He already had some college credit though, due to the military – not that any of it counted as anything he needed for his major, but it was elective credit!
The National Guard in WV paid 100% of his tuition, plus fees. He did have to go to an in-state college, of course. Then we got the GI bill on top of that. He continued to do his one weekend a month, so that was another couple hundred dollars a month. Plus, the guard will pay back student loans up to $10,000. So we both took out a few loans to help us over some humps when we were first married. I was on a full scholarship, so used my loans to pay off our car. We used some of his loans to pay off mine.
His original commitment was for 6 years. His requirements were to do the basic training, etc., mentioned above, then go to drill one weekend a month, and then he had to serve 2 weeks every summer. Sometimes those were fun (skiing in the alps), and sometimes they were a bummer (deep summer in Louisiana). Since he likes the military, he did a lot more than that (mountain climbing school, two languages, etc., etc.), but they were all basically voluntary things. He has been called up twice though, once to Kosovo and once to Iraq, but that’s part of it, and not bad for over 12 years of service.
My husband has a cousin who joined the Air Force to pay for Med School. I don’t know all his particulars, but he finished everything up 2 years ago and didn’t have to work any extra jobs all through school (though his wife did teach for extra income). I don’t know what he had to do while in school, but his commitment was for 3 years active duty after he finished. That’s almost over for them now.
I’ll throw my two cents in here because I was in the Army recently; take what I say with however much salt you need though, because I’m going from memory and things might have changed in the last few years even if I’m remembering 100% correctly.
The military is an awesome opportunity for young people to go to college. I was a high school dropout with a GED and now I’m a war veteran and a sophomore in engineering school. The GI bill is the basic military incentive dealing with college. Essentially, you pay $1200 the first year of service and then when your term of service is up, you have something like $25,000 for school. This is given no matter if you use it for tuition, as long as you go to school. I have the Illinois Veterans Grant that pays for tuition, so the GI bill just goes in my bank for spending money.
At various times, and depending on what job you get, the military offers certain “kickers” you can get by paying a little bit more into the GI bill pot; I paid an extra $600 for $5000 more after I got out. Thats a hell of a return on that investment. The Army also had the Army College Fund, which was just more money tacked on to the GI bill. When you hear “$40,000 for college” in the recruiting ads, they are lumping both the GI bill and the Army College Fund into that figure. (Other branches offer this sort of thing, but I’m only familiar with the Army College Fund.)
Here’s the secret, though: No matter what, if you get the Army to pay for college after you get out, you are getting, at most, $50,000 for school. And most jobs don’t even give you that much. Also, if you do ROTC or something you only get enough for a bachelor’s degree. But if you enlist after college, the Army will pay up to, I think, $65,000 to pay off student loans. I worked with a guy who got a master’s degree in biology, owed about $63,000 in loans, and got the Army to pay for all of it. This of course only works for enlisted soldiers, he tried to be an officer, but the Army would then only repay up to $20,000 for student loans.
So, if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably go into massive debt, get an advanced degree, and then have the Army pay for it all while I spent a couple years as an enlisted nobody with a lot less responsibility than the officers. I don’t know if your daughter wants to be an officer or not, but thats a big difference in how much the Army pays. Also, just so you know, the military in general tends to treat junior officers a lot worse than junior enlisted.
One more thing I forgot:
You might want to check your state to see if they have a veteran’s grant that pays for college. I’m not sure if it would be a better deal, though; like I said, I have the Illinois Veteran’s Grant and that lets me “double dip”, getting the state to pay for school and the Army giving me spending money via the GI bill. From what I understand though, Illinois is the only state that allows this. Most states, if they even have a veteran’s grant, only pay what the Army doesn’t. So unless “Location, Location” is in Illinois, your daughter might not be so lucky.
It’s already been said, but I’ll reiterate: under no circumstances should you believe that you can get the military to pay for daughter’s education and then not expect her to serve her full commitment.
I’ve served with people who tried to weasel out of their commitments after the military put them through college. The military really stuck it to them. Your daughter probably doesn’t want to go through college and med school and then be an enlisted person working in a military laundry for several years. Just saying.