Senate Passes GI Bill Education Expansion Legislation

The U.S. Senate overwhelmingly passed an expansion to the GI Bill last week that aims to extend educational benefits to soldiers who have served more than three years in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The GI Bill, formally known as The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, originally eased the cost of education for veterans returning home after World War II. Legislators say the benefits aren’t keeping pace with today’s expenses and sought to make changes.

Extending benefits could have greater or lesser impact on various campuses across the country, according to affiliates’ coverage. [Uwire]

Jen Wang of Short Hills, New Jersey, took her first SAT when she was in sixth grade, long before she would start filling out college applications.

“My family thought it was very important for me to do well on this test, and I basically obtained nearly every SAT study guide out there by the time I was a junior in high school,” she said. “For Christmas one year, I received an electronic device that allowed me to practice the SAT’s ‘on-the-go.’ ”

After all that preparation, she ended up attending a school that has made the SAT Reasoning Test, generally known as the SAT, the most widely used college admissions exam in the United States, optional.

Her school, Connecticut College, is one of a growing number of colleges and universities that are making the SAT optional in the admissions process. In May, two highly selective schools — Smith College in Massachusetts and Wake Forest University in North Carolina — decided to drop the SAT and ACT, which some students take as an alternative to the SAT, as requirements for admission. [CNN]