Massachusetts National Guard Tuition and Fee Waiver

The third paragraph of section 19 of chapter 15A is two sentences long and it is the most valuable education provision in the Massachusetts file. Such guidelines shall provide tuition and fee waivers for Massachusetts National Guard members. The commonwealth, not the institutions of public higher education, shall bear the cost of such tuition and fee waivers for Massachusetts National Guard members. Three things follow, and each is a contrast with the veterans waiver in the same section. It is mandatory. The veterans category is one the council "may" designate. For Guard members the guidelines "shall" provide waivers. The council has no discretion to leave the category out. It covers fees. This is the difference that decides what the benefit is worth. Massachusetts public institutions charge a low statutory tuition and a large mandatory fee, and at several campuses the fees are a multiple of the tuition. A waiver of tuition alone leaves most of the bill; a waiver of tuition and fees does not. The Guard provision is the only one in section 19 that names fees for a military category. And the commonwealth pays. Where the state reimburses, an institution has no reason to ration, and the allocation-formula problem that shapes the veterans waiver does not arise in the same way. The paragraph was inserted by section 2A of chapter 130 of the Acts of 2005, the same act that created the Welcome Home Bonus, and section 19 of that act made it effective on July 1, 2006. What the statute leaves open. It does not state a credit limit, a service obligation, an academic progress standard or a cap on the number of members who may hold a waiver in a year. Compare Nebraska, which caps its Guard programme at 1,200 members a fiscal year and requires federal tuition assistance to be exhausted first, and Kansas, which runs a separate educational assistance programme with its own repayment terms. Massachusetts says nothing about any of that in the statute, so the conditions are in council guidelines and in the Massachusetts National Guard's own programme rules. A member should get the current terms from the Guard's education services officer, and should ask specifically whether federal tuition assistance has to be used first, because that is the condition most likely to be imposed administratively. The related survivor provision is in the same chapter's neighbourhood rather than in section 19, and a Guard family should ask about it: the tuition waiver programme has historically extended to the spouse and children of a Guard member who died in the line of duty, and a family in that position should raise it with both the Adjutant General's education office and the Executive Office of Veterans Services rather than relying on a single source. A Guard member who is also a veteran under G.L. c. 4, s. 7, clause Forty-third, which requires 90 days of active service including a day of wartime service or 180 days without it, and which excludes active duty for training, may hold both this waiver and any veterans category waiver the guidelines provide. Guard service alone, without a qualifying active duty period, does not make a member a veteran for the clause Forty-third purposes that run most of the rest of this file, and that is the single most common misunderstanding among Massachusetts Guard members.