State lawmakers have ordered more data reporting about the Virginia Military Survivors and Dependents Education Program, which waives up to eight semesters of tuition at Virginia’s public colleges for eligible students.
As part of the new legislative mandate, nearly 40 two- and four-year colleges and two state agencies will be required to report detailed data on VMSDEP recipients and program funding to the General Assembly by Dec. 15 of each year.
Stakeholders have been asking for greater data transparency following a push in 2024 to institute cuts to the program in response to concerns from colleges about rising costs. Ultimately, all changes lawmakers made to the VMSDEP program were reversed following pushback.
“I think there’s a broad interest in this data,” said Lee Andes, the finance policy director for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. “People want to understand this program better.”
As VPM News previously reported, significant enrollment increases in recent years have meant that the state has had to step in and pick up some of the tuition costs that were previously covered entirely by schools. For example, the value of tuition waiversjumped from $12 million to $92 million over the span of about five years.
Andes said the program is growing faster than the state has predicted: According to SCHEV’s data, overall VMSDEP enrollment more than doubled from the 2021–22 school year to the 2024–25 school year, the most recent year with reported data.
“It’s an issue that’s going to continue to be a concern for the institutions, for policymakers,” Andes said. “It’ll also be an issue closely watched by the recipients.”
Kayla Owen, a co-founder of the advocacy group Friends of VMSDEP has been among those leading the charge to get better data on the program. She’s also a recent member of the state’s Board of Veterans Services, which requested more data this past December.
She told VPM News it’s important to have a better view of the data to understand where the program is today before further changes are made.
“There needs to be accurate and transparent data,” Owen said. “There needs to be clearly defined variables and a chain of data.”
Part of the problem, she said, is that two Virginia agencies that will be required to do the data reporting — the Department of Veteran Services and SCHEV — are already both involved in administering the program and have independent data sets. DVS certifies program eligibility, while SCHEV applies the financial aid benefits.
Tod Massa, SCHEV’s policy analytics director, said the new mandate will require unifying the agencies’ data sets. He said a lack of common standards, particularly around when data is collected and reported, has led to some discrepancies.
One reason SCHEV hasn’t reported “very discretely” on the VMSDEP population in the past, Massa said, is because it’s a relatively small population. (According to SCHEV data for the 2024-25 school year, there were about 10,600 students enrolled in VMSDEP statewide.)
“There’s only so many crosstabs you can do over time about their success before I have to start dropping rows and saying ‘No, we can’t show this in order to protect confidentiality,’” Massa said.
A. Scott Fleming, SCHEV’s executive director, said there’s also been a disconnect between stakeholders about what the true cost is for the colleges to provide the tuition waivers.
For example, he said, institutions look at the waivers through the lens of lost revenue based on their advertised tuition rate — but that may not be the actual incremental cost of waiving tuition for one student.
“The incremental cost of educating one more student is probably not equal to the published tuition rate at any particular institution,” Fleming told VPM News, “but is also not zero.”
Ultimately, Fleming said SCHEV isn’t in a position to say what the actual cost is at any specific institution to serve members of the VMSDEP community. He said the council is “content to be a data communicator,” adding that “we’ll leave the policy to the General Assembly.”
VMSDEP remains a top priority for DVS. In an April meeting, Commissioner John Maxwell said the program is one of three “near-term” priorities.
“We know that we’ve got to dig into this program and come up with a long-term plan that honors those who it’s designed to serve,” he said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for DVS said the data analysis in partnership with SCHEV is “not about delaying action — it is about doing the due diligence necessary to make informed decisions that ensure the program continues to meet the needs of the people it was designed to serve,” adding that “DVS’s priority remains ensuring that veterans and their families have access to the benefits they have earned.”
In a DVS meeting on Friday, Sept. 11, state Sen. Tara Durant (R–Stafford) said she’s hoping the additional data will inform the General Assembly on any future decisions about VMSDEP.
Lawmakers proposed some changes to the program earlier this year, but they didn’t clear the General Assembly.
“We can make some more, I think, educated decisions on if there are any type of changes we want to make,” Durant said. “We’ll have more of the data behind it to support that.”
Until the data is available, she said, lawmakers are in a “holding pattern” in terms of how the program will continue.