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| Emanuel Chestnut, left, talks with TCC school administration regarding graduation eligibility of Kasey Hamilton, right, a Navy veteran, at his office at the Virginia Beach campus. Chestnut is a Navy vet who works as an adviser to help veterans feel welcome and navigate through the maze of paperwork. (Hyunsoo Leo Kim | The Virginian-Pilot) |
The new GI bill has helped spur an enrollment boom at Tidewater Community College, which has the nation’s second-highest number of students receiving benefits.
TCC is the only community college in the top five with 1,414 students enrolled last fall at its four campuses under the Post-9/11 GI bill according to a recent ranking by Inside Higher Education, an online source of college information.
Many of the top 25 schools are primarily online programs, such as Capella University, or schools in areas with a concentrated military population, such as San Diego Mesa College and Florida State College in Jacksonville.
Two other local schools ranked in the top 25: Old Dominion University, eighth, with 725 students, and ECPI College of Technology, which has two campuses in Hampton Roads, 18th, with 536 students. The chart and TCC used enrollment data as of Dec. 9.
The new GI Bill, championed by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., covers all tuition and fees for some recent veterans at public and some private schools. Often, benefits can be transferred to a spouse or child and can be used for books and housing. The program went into effect last year.
“A distinctive piece of Hampton Roads is the military presence, thus a distinctive piece of the community college for Hampton Roads should be military,” TCC President Debbie DiCroce said, “and we’ve embraced that for years.”
One appeal, she said, is that TCC offers programs that are familiar to those in the service. Compared with other TCC students, those on the GI Bill are taking more career and technical programs such as in information systems technology. A higher percentage are on the transfer track, meaning they will move on to a four-year college.
TCC’s lower costs are attractive to all students, DiCroce said.
DiCroce said the school has striven to create a reputation of being military-friendly. Through partnerships with ODU and Norfolk State University, it offers Army and Navy ROTC programs, and its campuses often have served as a training center for the Navy.
excerpts from Denise Watson Batts at The Virginian-Pilot