One of the biggest things that concerns college students is scholarships. For incoming military-affiliated students and veterans, new scholarships will now be available through the Veterans Affairs Office.
“I’ve been here for just over two years,” Director of the Office of Veterans Affairs Tony Banchs said. “I noticed a trend where a veteran would walk in with their child, and they hadn’t transferred the benefit to them or they had already put their VA benefit on one child and this was like a second or third child that was trying to come to school, and they had nothing.”
To help solve this problem and offer something to the children and spouses of veterans, the Office of Veterans Affairs created new scholarships.
“This was a way of ETSU recognizing family members who do serve,” Banchs said. “The veteran deploys, and the spouse and the children are home doing the best that they can. This is a small way to reward these people for the sacrifices that they have made.”
Another reason the scholarships were made was to help veterans who’s GI Bills were expiring before they could finish their majors.
“We wanted to incentivize veterans to continue – keep going, get to your goal,” Banchs said. “That’s why we created a continuing scholarship for the veterans.”
There are four categories of scholarships for veterans and military-affiliated students. The first category waives out-of-state tuition, the second is for spouses who can go part-time or full-time, the third scholarships category is for the children of veterans and the fourth is for veterans whose GI Bills are close to expiring.
“We are the only school that we’ve looked into in Tennessee that offers any such incentive to military affiliated students,” Banchs said.
The scholarships are available for new military-affiliated students and veterans, and they must have a 2.5 GPA and not qualify for any other ETSU-issued scholarships.
“This is for people who have no other ETSU scholarships to give them a little bit of an incentive,” Banchs said.
Banchs said that he hopes that these new scholarships will encourage veterans and military-affiliated students to come to ETSU.
“One thing that we pride ourselves in is that we’ve been selected as a military spouse friendly school for the first time ever in our history,” Banchs said. “And this will continue to reinforce the reason why ETSU was selected as a military spouse friendly school. We’ve created a new scholarship. We filled a need that was out there in the community.”
For those interested in applying to the scholarships, they can contact the Office of Veterans Affairs va@etsu.edu, call 423-439-5273 or go to Burgin-Dossett, room 101A.
