SInce I work with returning Veterans every day, and am a Veteran myself (I know, cool story bro), I wanted to get the story straight about the policy regarding the Veterans. If you recall there was a Vet from Dearborn who was charged 10k extra because of an error with his state residency, and his claim that Veterans are being disciminated against. The board had his story up here on Feb 17th...
I wrote a letter to the PR folks at Michigan and they sent me the letter that they sent to WDIV in Detroit. They have taken the story down from their website.Hopefully this clears things up for everyone.
We were quite surprised to see your news report Thursday night on the student veteran at UM-Dearborn who addressed the U-M Board of Regents that afternoon.
What surprised us the most was that you accepted everything the student said as fact without asking the student for documentation or checking with anyone at the university.
Your report indicated that because of a residency policy UM-Dearborn had lost 40 percent of its veterans this semester. Had you checked with us we could have told you that student veteran enrollment at UM-Dearborn is off by only 9 percent (12 students) this semester compared to fall semester and enrollment of veterans has been virtually constant (119, 115, 118) during the winter semester for the past three years.
Your report also contains numerous other inaccuracies. However, federal student privacy law prohibits us from sharing these specifics without first getting the student’s permission. We hope you will take that step so we can more fully respond to the inaccuracies.
We can tell you that U-M does not use its residency policy against veterans with overseas deployments to charge them out-of-state tuition. Actually we have an extensive policy designed to do just the opposite.
At the University of Michigan we value the hundreds of students on our three campuses who have served in the military. That’s why we fully participate in the VA’s Yellow Ribbon Program and two of our three campuses are on the list of “military friendly” schools. And that’s why we have facilitated a veteran support network on each campus.
Perhaps there is even more we can do to support veterans at U-M. But to say we discriminate against them because of their overseas deployment is grossly inaccurate.