Military Advanced Education (MAE) has awarded Gadsden State Community College the designation of a Top School in its 2015 MAE Guide to Colleges & Universities, measuring best practices in military and veteran education. The Guide was released in the December issue of MAE, and is available online at www.mae-kmi.com.
The Guide presents results of a questionnaire of the military-supportive policies enacted at more than 600 institutions including private, public, for-profit, not-for-profit, four-year, and two-year colleges. From community colleges to state universities, online universities and nationally known centers of higher learning, MAE’s 2015 Guide to Colleges & Universities arms students with information about institutions that go out of their way to give back to our men and women in uniform.
Now in its eighth year of publishing the Guide, MAE was the first publication to launch a reference tool of this type. This year, institutes were evaluated on their military culture, financial aid, flexibility, on-campus support and online support services. Each school’s performance rating by category is represented by an easy-to-recognize dashboard. This will enable prospective students to quickly target schools that follow best practices in military education, and then put these in context with other academic or career considerations.
“We believe the Guide serves as an invaluable tool for both education services officers and transition officers when advising service members about their educational opportunities,” said Kelly Fodel, MAE’s editor. “We used strict criteria to individually evaluate the submissions of respondents, and we had a record number of schools participating this year.”
“Not only is the 2015 Guide printed in our December issue of Military Advanced Education, but also published in a searchable database online,” Fodel said. “We designed this database with the military student in mind. We want to help them make informed choices, so we are giving them access to all the survey questions and answers provided by the schools, as well as explanations about critical issues like activation and deployment policies, withdrawal policies, scholarship and financial aid information and important support information.”
Dr. Martha Lavender, interim president of GSCC, said, “We are pleased to receive this designation recognizing our long standing commitment to serving our veterans. These students bring maturity, honor, and a worldly experience to our college that enriches everyone. Gadsden State’s Veteran’s Upward Bound (VUB) Program is designed to motivate and assist veterans in the development of academic and other skills necessary to succeed in a postsecondary education program.”
Gadsden State has one of the two Veterans Upward Bound (VUB) Programs in Alabama. The program provides assessment and enhancement of basic skills through counseling, mentoring, tutoring, and academic instruction in the core subject areas. The primary goal of the program is to increase the rate at which participants enroll in and complete postsecondary education programs.
Visit www.mae-kmi.com for online access to MAE’s 2015 Guide to Colleges and Universities, or pick up a copy of the December issue of Military Advanced Education.