In order to raise awareness about barriers to veteran education and initiatives being undertaken to improve it, National Louis University and Student Veterans of America joined forces to host March 26’s “Improving Veteran Education Symposium” at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in Washington.

There, the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative spoke with two expert panelists (who also happen to be veterans themselves) to get the inside scoop on how the media can do a better job of covering veteran education.

Advice from Megan Everett, Northwestern University alum, Program Officer of the Veterans Program at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and United States Navy veteran:

• Put higher education institutions who are dropping the ball when it comes to serving veterans on blast in order to pressure them to step their games up.
  • Indicators to watch:
    • Does the school have staff members explicitly dedicated to serving veterans?
      • “We have certifying officials that work to certify the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill and do some financial aid work, but there’s no person who has ‘veteran’ in their title,” Everett said of Northwestern University, where she is currently working to improve the state of veterans’ resources on campus.
    • Do veterans have dedicated physical spaces on campus?
    • Does the school have a functional veteran service group?
    • Other data points and factors to keep an eye on
      • Veteran student recruiting
      • Veteran student retention
      • Utilization of veteran student skill sets

Advice from David Goldich, Senior Consultant at Gallup and United States Marine Corps veteran:

• Don’t assume that very veteran’s experience is identical or make instant extrapolations about the entire military community based on a single person’s story.
  • “Realize that it’s not a monolith; it’s a mosaic, when you’re talking about veterans or the military,” he explained during the post-panel Q&A. He advised reporters to recognize how differences in areas such as military branch, employment status, gender, levels of physical ability and more impact individual experience.
• “Connect the dots” and move from merely looking at veteran graduation rates to an analysis of “what works for who [sic] and why.”
  • “No one’s talking to each other,” he explained. “Everyone’s measuring their little own slice of the block—pie. They’ve got blinders.”
• Questions to ask:
  • Does education lead to an improved quality of life
  • Does education lead to better employment?
  • What identifiable indicators led people to pursue higher education after their military service?
  • Find “thematic connections” between different stages of a veteran student’s life to better understand the stories behind different veteran outcomes.

Compared to rapid progress for much of the past year, progress seems to have stalled a bit this summer.

Chart and table below detail changes month-to-month, week-to-week and year-over-year.

Data is taken from the VBA’s weekly “Monday Morning Workload Reports” that track claims processing progress. We think monthly tracking is a better barometer of actual progress because it flattens out some of the temporary ups and downs the weekly reports reflect.

View earlier progress  summaries.

The Project on Government Oversight and the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America asked veterans and Veterans Administration employees to share their stories about problems with the VA. The results so far:

In its 33-year history, POGO has never received as many submissions on a single issue—nearly 800 current and former VA employees and veterans contacted us. POGO reviewed each of the submissions, and the comments indicate that concerns about the VA go far beyond long or falsified wait times for medical appointments; they extend to the quality of health care services veterans receive.

POGO received allegations of wrongdoing from 35 states and the District of Columbia, and in the limited time we have had thus far to analyze the information, a recurring and fundamental theme has become clear: VA employees across the country fear they will face repercussions if they dare to raise a dissenting voice.

Full Story.

On average from January through June, the unemployment rate among so-called “Gulf War Era II” veterans was 7.8% — a 25% drop from the 9% rate for 2013. The unemployment rate during the second quarter of this year averaged 6.4% compared to 8% in the first quarter, indicating continued positive progress as the year unfolds.

By comparison, the rate for non-veterans in the first half of this year averaged 6.4%.

An average of 175,000 post-9/11 veterans was out of work each month for the first six months of this year.

The Gulf War II veteran jobless rate remains significantly higher than the veteran population as a whole — 27% above the average 5.7% rate for all veterans in the first six months. That is a tiny bit improved over last year, when the overall 9% rate for Gulf War II veterans was just over one-third higher.

The VA loves to talk about how it’s on track to reach its goal next year of completing all disability compensation and pension claims within 125 days—keeping them off the dreaded “backlogged” list. Frequently overlooked? The other two-thirds of VA claims—or more than 1 million requests—aren’t subject to the department’s 125-days, 98-percent accuracy goal. . . .

What are these other claims clogging up the VA’s system?

They run the gamut from aiming to change the amount of disability pay a veteran receives to appealing previous decisions by the department. They also include responses to congressional inquiries. So while the number of pending VA disability claims has shrunk in recent years, the number of overall claims has mushroomed to roughly 1.64 million. That’s compared with 941,666 in late 2009.

Full Story

May  was the fourth consecutive month of progress after stalls in November and December of 2013.

Chart and table below detail changes month-to-month, week-to-week and year-over-year.

Data is take from the VBA’s weekly “Monday Morning Workload Reports” that track claims processing progress. We think monthly tracking is a better barometer of actual progress because it flattens out some of the temporary ups and downs the weekly reports reflect.

View earlier progress  summaries.

Without further action, the audit (PDF version) said, the VBA “could continue making unsupported payments to veterans totaling about $371 million over the next 5 years.”

“We remain concerned of VBA’s financial stewardship of these claims,” Linda A. Halliday,
assistant inspector general for audits and evaluations wrote.

The VBA in a response to the audit said it disagreed with the estimate of improper payments, calling it “significantly overstated” and based on a too-small sample.

The report is embedded below.

One option, albeit a potentially expensive one: an online and phone survey with a sound methodology that will yield scientifically confident results.

That is what one congressman’s office in El Paso did, and the results released this week challenge in some cases the party line from the Veterans Administration. As USA Today recounted on Wednesday:

More than a third of veterans surveyed in the district of Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, said they were unable to get mental health care appointments at the VA. Forty-three percent said they put off therapy because of trouble seeing a counselor, and veterans said it took more than three months to be seen on average.

This differed sharply from what the VA reported for El Paso, O’Rourke said. The agency told him that 85% to 100% of veterans were provided mental health appointments within 14 days.

“The best way to determine how the VA is doing is to ask the veterans themselves,” O’Rourke said in a release about the survey his office undertook in May. That’s a light-bulb moment for journalists, as well.

The survey used as its base a list of 19,000 names of veterans within the district. (On the Beat is trying to track down whether those names were obtained as public records, and from whom, or were from a proprietary vendor database. Haven’t heard back from O’Rourke’s office yet). Those names were matched against a vendor’s phone and e-mail list.

The bulk of the surveys were completed online (503) after e-mail contact; a smaller number (189) were taken by telephone. The margin of error for all respondents is believed to be just under four percentage points in either direction.

Highlights of the findings, taken from O’Rourke’s summary report:

• Nearly 2 in 5 who attempted to schedule a mental healthcare appointment were unable to obtain one.
• An average of 71 days elapsed between a request for an appointment and seeing a mental health care provider.
• About 3 in 4 veterans requesting an appointment with a mental health care provider waited more than 14 days to see one.
• An average of 85 days elapsed between a veteran’s request for a routine care (non-mental health) appointment and seeing a health care provider.
• About 7 in 10 requesting a non-mental health care appointment waited more than 14 days to see a provider.
• About 1 in 3 were either very unsatisfied or unsatisfied with quality of non-mental health care at the El Paso VA.

(Memo via Washington Post).