Stepping off

Once you understand system of higher education in California, you need to know where you fit in, and here's the straight dope: you're going to community college. I don't care how many correspondence courses, online courses, CLEP courses, or supposedly ACE-certified courses you took.

You are going to community college.

Why do I say this so confidently? Because over 90% of veterans who go to college in California attend community college, and you're not special. Odds are you are going to do exactly what the rest of us had to do.

It's not a bad thing, either. Community college is easier than a four-year university (with a few exceptions) letting you ease yourself into the academic and social environment. And college is different, trust me. You'll have older professors from the Vietnam era with all kinds of crazy ideas about war and the military. You'll have eighteen year-olds who want to lecture you on how we should be fighting in Iraq (that or challenging you to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare tournaments). You'll be a older than most of the students and find it hard to connect with them. And you'll be in the middle of this big ol' goatrope just trying to graduate and get a damn job.

So how do you do it? You start by getting paid to do it.

The GI Bill website has a link you can use to determine if you're better off with new Post 9/11 version or the old Montgomery version. If you want, click here to compare the two but I can save you the trouble: you're better off with it. Only guys who have been out for a certain amount of time and live on weird farms in the middle of nowhere get more money with the Montgomery GI Bill. You want the new one, called Chapter 33, the Post 9/11 GI Bill, or just the new GI Bill.

If you go to school, do yourself a favor and go full-time. Generally this means taking 12 units and, if you're smart, getting your degree in the shortest period of time. This maxes out your benefits, which come in three parts with the new GI Bill.

1) You get an annual $1,000 textbook stipend (but it can be less if you don't take as many units)
2) You get BAH equivalent to an E-5 with 1 dependent based on your zip code. Check out this link to find different rates.
3) Your school (not you) gets tuition and fees equivalent to the most expensive public school in the state. Follow this link to see the breakdown of states from last year.

At this point you should be able to get a pretty good idea of what your benefits will look like. If you have a wife, expensive girlfriend, legitimate kids, illegitimate kids, or you eat organic food, it's important to track your expenses because this is not as much money as it appears at first glance. Basically the new GI Bill makes it so you can have around $1400-1500 a month (on average in California) beyond what it costs to go to school. That's enough to avoid having a full-time job even if you live on your own, and that's what it was designed to do.

Before you use the GI Bill, though, you need to actually enroll in school. We'll hit that topic tomorrow.