Military and veteran students to get academic credits for military training

PatrioticStarC0907_L_300_C_YThe Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, in ­cooperation with the Illinois Community College Board, several community colleges, the Illinois Board of Higher Education and MyCreditsTransfer, recently completed a collaborative project to grant veteran and military students appropriate academic credit for the education and training they gained in military service.

In this “Making Military Training Count” initiative, the College of DuPage, College of Lake County, Heartland Community College, Kaskaskia Community College, and Southwestern Illinois College reviewed military programs of instruction documents from among the ten military career fields, with the largest number of service members provided by the Department of Defense, and worked to develop educational credits that applied to an ­educational major in Illinois. Servicemen and women can enter ­community ­college with earned course credits, useful credits that apply toward meeting degree requirements, simply by ­documenting their already-completed military training.

The amount of educational credit granted by each school for a specific military career field ranged from 3 to 31 credit hours, so roughly one college course through to a full year of full-time study. One highlight from the ­program is Southwestern Illinois College’s decision to grant 31 credit hours toward the electrical and electronics repair ­educational field for service members that served in the U.S. Navy as electronics technicians. The project also resulted in community colleges granting military credit toward an educational objective for those who served in the areas of computer support/information technology and fire science.

The results of the project are available to service ­members through the Transferology web site

(www.transferology.com).