If it weren’t for individual schools stepping up to fill the gap, Illinois’ abandonment of the Illinois Veterans Grant would leave many who served our country without the education they earned. While schools are managing to keep up with the payments, it’s up in the air how long that can that last.

So what exactly is the IVG? According to Jose Alferez, Manager of Veterans Services at College of Dupage, “IVG is supposed to pay for tuition [for veterans] and some fees associated with going to school at any state public institution. Students have been using it for years. The nice thing about IVG is that it doesn’t expire. I have students here that are in their 70s still taking classes that are veterans.”

While the idea behind IVG is a wonderful one, the state of Illinois chose to cut its funding in 2012. However, because it is still a working organization, veterans still have the opportunity to apply, and COD has to pay out of pocket for any and all services the grant should be covering.

Alferez explains, “It’s not that a decision was made to stop funding it in perpetuity; it’s just the way that it’s happened in the last few years. They haven’t appropriated funds for it. It’s similar to how they’ve sometimes stopped appropriations for Map Grant. Except, Map Grant for the most part has at least partially come through in the past few years whereas IVG hasn’t come in at all. It was a state decision.”

We at the Courier are sincerely concerned for what this could mean for the student veterans and for COD. There are 600 veterans being “funded” by IVG at COD this semester alone. We have had budgetary issues in the past with our previous president, and the audit that was just released shows that there are many issues with our budget we need to address.

The Courier reached out to Earl Dowling, the Vice President of Student Affairs and current school board member, to find out just how much money this is costing the school, but received no response.

According to Alferez however, if a student were to take a full 12 credit hours tuition alone would cost the school $2,000. While this may not seem like a lot of money for a state college to give, when you consider that there are 600 students in total, it starts to add up.

It’s not a question of whether or not veterans should have to pay for school; it’s a question of whether the schools can afford it.

While budget cuts are a problem across the board in Illinois, this is something that was guaranteed to the veterans when they left their service. The state schools never thought they would be having to pay for this, and now they have to pull these funds out of thin air in order to fulfill the state’s promise.

What happens if COD were to run out of veteran funding? “As this money continues to not come in, it could potentially affect us in the future,” Alferez explains. “I try not to think that way. My focus has been and will continue to be to try to expand services as much as we’re able to. I really don’t know. It depends on where outside funding could step in and help.”

While it’s clear that Veterans Services are hoping for other funding opportunities, we believe COD should also be actively looking for other ways to fund veteran’s education. Perhaps we need to be pushing alternative and more reliable grants and bills, such as the GI Bill. Or perhaps we need to seek out more grants that will assist in funding state schools, since it seems they will have to continue to fund IVG students for some time.