Research Proposal

Benjamin Homa
Professor Goeller
Research In Disciplines: College!
October 31st, 2014

Working Title: American Soldiers, the Unforgotten Students.

Topic:
    I will be exploring how universities and the government have forgotten about the average student, but still focus on helping students coming from the U.S military. My paper will show examples from the past few decades how U.S government shifted its priorities in educational spending. It will compare how the average student was helped decades ago until recent years to how the average veteran was helped decades ago until recent years.

Research Question:
    Has the U.S government forgotten about the average citizen and their hardships to attain a college degree? Or has the government decided to focus mainly on its veterans who are now returning from war? 

Theoretical Frame:
   For the past few decades the cost of tuition has increased causing a larger burden for the average student. Government financial aid has not grown proportionally alongside it for the average student, but for a select group of citizens the government has always been available to pay the bill. The G.I Bill or as it was first known as, the Serviceman Readjustment Act was passed in 1944 to help pay for college education for returning veterans from war. Leading up until today the G.I Bill has been updated several times to help with the new hardships that many students are seeing today. At the same time the U.S government has passed several bills that were based off of the G.I Bill to help students coming from different classes and lifestyles, but these programs have been ignored and not as well funded in recent years. This has caused many students attending universities to apply for private loans, causing great hardships that affect todays average student.
   This topic is of great interest to me as I have served in a foreign military, where its respected government also pays for its veterans education. At the same time this government has several programs to help the average student pay for their education, that are as effective as is for their veterans. I first came up with this idea when wanting to compare both the U.S government and the government of the country in whose' military I served.      

Research and Plan:
   To research my paper, I am going to be looking at several programs in the United States that are designed to helping the average student pay for education. I will be comparing those programs to the G.I Bill and discover if they have any link between them. In Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design in Postwar America by Patricia Starch, I was able to find data on most programs that are currently available in the United States. From here I will be able to show the founding and passing of these government bill that were designed to help the average American. I will show how in past years, most programs that were designed to help the average student have been ignored, while programs helping veterans are constantly being tended to.
  For a counter argument I will take examples from David T. Vacchi and his article Considering Student Veterans on the Twenty First Century College Campus. The counter arguments will be that the U.S government is actually not doing enough for veterans. "Administrators must acknowledge the inflexibility of the federal government’s fiscal year and plan to accommodate student veterans using the GI Bill by not expecting payments until well after the first day in October during the fall semester” (Page 20, Vacchi). This quote from Vacchi's article claims that although the government is helping its veterans its not doing so on basis that universities are accustomed to, and these problems are passed onto veterans who aren't able to handle these types of situations. Other points that I will bring in to counter this argument is proving that G.I Bill does not only benefit veterans, but also how it benefits the country as a whole.


Bibliography:

STRACH, PATRICIA. "Making Higher Education Affordable: Policy Design In Postwar America." Journal Of Policy History 21.1 (2009): 61-88. Academic Search Premier. Web. 23 Oct. 2014.

https://login.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=44122934&site=eds-live

Vacchi, David. "Considering Student Veterans on the Twenty-first-century College Campus." About Campus, 18 June 2012. Web. 16 Oct. 2014. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/abc.21075/citedby.