The Army is once again grappling with technical problems and is seemingly unable to reliably pay out education benefits to soldiers, just as deadlines for fall semester enrollments have passed at many universities.
For at least a month, soldiers have been reporting issues accessing their benefits though Army IgnitED, an online portal that handles tuition payments and for years has been marred by technical issues. And the Army has no timeline on when a fix will be coming, according to a statement online from the service.
“We are tracking this issue,” a statement on the Army IgnitED Facebook page said. “We don’t have an ETA on the fix at this time.”
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The news comes as the service has seen a relentless onslaught of education benefits-related issues, raising doubts about how well the Army can keep its end of the bargain on education benefits, which are widely seen as a key recruiting tool.
“It’s very frustrating. I’m on the fence on reenlisting, and this isn’t making me feel great about the Army,” one noncommissioned officer told Military.com on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press. “I wasn’t expecting to use my emergency savings.”
The Army’s tuition assistance is a separate program from the GI Bill, which is managed through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Roughly 100,000 beneficiaries per year use the service’s tuition assistance program, which provides up to $250 per semester hour, with a $4,000 benefits cap per year.
It’s unclear what the cause of the issue is, its scope or whether the service plans to reimburse troops who have to pay out-of-pocket costs for classes until the problem is fixed.
In 2021, Army IgniteED crumbled under the weight of numerous glitches — making education benefits difficult to access for the 10,000 beneficiaries who use those benefits annually. Most of those issues were not fixed until June of last year.
The service ended up having to reimburse nearly 800 beneficiaries who had to pay out of pocket, though many soldiers at the time reported having to drop out of school because they didn’t have the means to pay for it themselves while the Army was drowning in technical snafus.
Some 23,000 beneficiaries attended schools that held off on billing students and waited on the Army to cover the tab. In some cases, it took the service that entire two years of downtime to pay back those schools.
Some schools at the time, including the University of New Mexico, stopped accepting provisional payments from the Army — effectively a promise from the service that it will eventually pay a beneficiary’s tuition — because the service fell so far behind on its bills.
Army IgnitED launched in 2021 as the successor to GoArmyEd. The launch was a disaster, and the program was almost immediately shut down. The botched launch drew the ire of Congress, and Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, the top enlisted leader of the service who has since retired, held an extensive town hall and press conference, answering questions on how the Army was fixing the site.
Meanwhile, Army officials are eyeing dramatic cuts next year to the Army Credentialing Assistance program, or Army CA, to counter enormous costs associated with the program. The move could be one of the most dramatic cuts to benefits for service members in recent years.
Army CA, a separate benefit from tuition assistance, is geared toward short-term education programs and certifications such as commercial driver’s licenses, coding language skills, personal training and other skills that can supplement a soldier’s career and translate to a civilian career.
When asked about Military.com’s reporting on the matter, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told lawmakers in April that the program was a “catastrophic success” because of its popularity and subsequent runaway costs. Some 64,000 soldiers have used Army CA since it was introduced four years ago. Its popularity steadily grew, costing the Army $8 million in 2022 and exploding to $60.2 million last year.
It’s unclear what specific changes the Army is looking at with its CA program. But some of those changes may include putting more guardrails on what kind of courses the Army will pay for, which may include requiring courses to clearly relate to the soldier’s job, according to service officials familiar with the situation.
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