Quick Takes

While the Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged the concerns of many campus officials that they were experiencing serious delays with benefits for students eligible for the greatly expanded Post-9/11 GI Bill, and expedited payments to veterans in many cases, college administrators remain on high alert about the issue. So when the VA revamped its weekly Monday Morning Workload Reports this month, and omitted the all-important education claims (as reported by the National Journal's NextGov), the move set off alarm bells for some veterans' education administrators. "A gov’t report that has existed in the same format for decades suddenly declared misleading when the figures get alarming? Oh please!!!!" wrote one campus official on a widely read listserv. Asked about the disappearance of the statistics from the weekly report, a spokesman for the Veterans Affairs Department said that the education claims had been "inadvertently" dropped in the revision, and that they would return in the next report. For those following at home, the spokesman provided the following numbers for the week of October 11-17: Buffalo, 68,847; Atlanta, 57,090; St. Louis, 45,112; Muskogee, 64,848; Total, 232,897.