Mizzou Online announces new military tuition assistance
MU Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin, along with other speakers, announced a new online tuition discount for active-duty military personnel, their spouses and their dependents. MU made the announcement at a news conference last week.
The 10 percent tuition discount is effective for Mizzou Online students as of Wednesday and applies to the current semester and future semesters for accepted applicants.
Stacy Snow, spokeswoman for Mizzou Online, says discussion of the award started in Fall 2014. MU will fund the award using revenue shares from reinvested tuition dollars.
“We have been working with people in the military for years now and realized that there were still some things that, cost-wise, held back some of them from choosing Mizzou,” says Snow. “We wanted to become more competitive with this audience as well as extend the benefit that we could scale.”
The award was made for Mizzou Online’s “distance” students affiliated with the military, either as a service member, spouse of a service member or dependent child, who have found it difficult to earn a degree because of the ever-changing demands and traveling of military service.
During MU’s 2014-2015 academic school year, Snow says around 80 to 100 distance students with military affiliation were enrolled on Mizzou Online. She added that 10 percent of MU’s overall student body is in a distance program.
“I’ve heard some people say, ‘oh 10 percent, that’s not a lot,’” says Snow. “But one of the things we are allowed to do as the funding entity of the award is to scale it. It’s an amount that we can accommodate to a wide section of this population without putting a limit on it because we feel it is part of our mission to extend Mizzou’s option to many people.”
Qualifying students can apply for the tuition discount on an undergraduate or graduate degree if they can show certification of military benefits, remain active as a Mizzou student and maintain a 2.0 GPA.
The tuition award application can be submitted online, where a submission of the applicant’s federal student aid forms is also required.
According to Mizzou Online’s website, the tuition award can only be applied when the student is in a degree or certificate program. A maximum of 150 cumulative credit hours toward a bachelor’s degree or 75 credit hours toward a graduate degree can be applied to the tuition discount.
“The number one goal of this award is to add a benefit to military personnel that didn’t exist before,” says Snow. “This a way we can chip away at any remaining cost barriers.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story referenced Stacy Snow saying that 10 percent of MU students were military-affiliated; She actually said that 10 percent of MU students are enrolled in a distance program.
Photos provided by Mizzou Online and Jonathan Adams.