South Carolina Free Tuition for a War Veteran’s Child

Section 59-111-20 is the largest education benefit in South Carolina for a family member and the shortest statute governing one. It is worth reading in the order the statute builds it, because three of its limits are easy to miss and one of its doors is wider than any secondary description says. 2026 Act No. 135 (H. 3453), signed May 15, 2026 and effective that day, rewrote the section. It kept every service condition and both limits on the child, moved them into subsections (B) and (C), and turned the residency test into its own subsection (A) with a fourth route. The published Code of Laws still prints the 2025 text, so the subsection letters below are the act's, not the code's. The grant. A child of a wartime veteran, "upon application to and approval by the South Carolina Department of Veterans' Affairs, may be admitted to any state-supported college, university, or post high school technical education institution free of tuition so long as his work and conduct is satisfactory to the governing body of the institution". Tuition. Not fees, not room, not board, not books. In a state where mandatory fees at some public institutions run to thousands of dollars a year, the difference is real. Compare the National Guard College Assistance Program in Chapter 114 of the same title, which is written to "tuition and fees" and defines that term to include textbooks. The veteran's service, in subsection (B). Honorable service in a branch of the military service of the United States "during a war period, as those periods are defined by Section 101 of Title 38 of the United States Code". That is the federal wartime period list, so it moves when Congress moves it and it does not require combat or a theatre of operations, only service inside the dates. The veteran's condition, which is one of nine alternatives in subsection (B): killed in action; died from other causes while in the service; died of disease or disability resulting from service; was a prisoner of war as defined by Congress or Presidential proclamation during the war period; "is permanently and totally disabled, as determined by the Veterans Administration from any cause"; has been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor; is missing in action; is the child of a deceased veteran who qualified under items (4) and (5); or has been awarded the Purple Heart for wounds received in combat. Item (5) is the door almost nobody describes correctly. "Permanently and totally disabled, as determined by the Veterans Administration from any cause." The words "from any cause" mean the permanent and total disability does not have to be service-connected. A wartime veteran whom VA has found permanently and totally disabled for pension purposes, on a non-service-connected basis, is inside item (5). Every guide that says "100 percent service-connected" is reading a requirement into the statute that the General Assembly wrote out of it. Item (9), the Purple Heart route, has no disability in it at all and no death. A wartime veteran who was awarded the Purple Heart, is alive, well and working, still opens this benefit for a child. That is unusually broad. Item (8) is a drafting problem the catalog should report rather than resolve. It reaches "the applicant is the child of a deceased veteran who qualified under items (4) and (5)". Read conjunctively it requires a deceased veteran who was both a prisoner of war and permanently and totally disabled, which is a very small class; read disjunctively, as the Department of Veterans' Affairs administers it, it covers the child of a deceased former POW or of a deceased permanently and totally disabled veteran. The statute says "and", and 2026 Act No. 135 re-enacted the item without changing the word. Residency, which is now four alternatives in subsection (A). The veteran "was a resident of this State at the time of entry into service and during service", or "has been a resident of this State for at least one year and still resides in this State", or, if deceased, "resided in this State for one year before his death", or, added in 2026, "the veteran's child has been a resident of this State since birth". Any one of the four suffices. The fourth route is the first that looks at the child rather than the veteran: a child born and raised in South Carolina qualifies even where the veteran never lived here or has since moved away. Subsection (C) then separately requires the child to meet the residency requirements of Chapter 112 of Title 59, which is the general in-state tuition chapter, and Section 59-112-50(C) inside that chapter is itself generous to military families. The Department of Veterans' Affairs administers the residency test more narrowly than the statute on one point. Its program page tells applicants that "both the Student and the Veteran (if living) must have established residency in South Carolina for at least the twelve continuous months immediately prior to the date of receipt of the application and still be a current resident". The first route in subsection (A), residence at entry into service and during service, asks nothing about where a living veteran resides now, and the new fourth route asks nothing about the veteran at all; the department's own note on the 2026 change concedes the second point. A family whose veteran entered service from South Carolina and later moved should cite subsection (A)(1). The same page cites the amended section as "Section 59-11-20", which does not exist, and its eligibility tab still quotes a pre-2026 text that adds "and still resides in this State" to the first route, words the code did not contain even before the 2026 act. The department also treats the date it receives the application as the benefit's effective date, so tuition paid before applying is not refunded. Subsection (C) carries the two hard limits. The child must be "twenty-six years of age or younger", and must be "pursuing any type of undergraduate degree". Graduate study is out. A certificate or diploma programme that is not an undergraduate degree is, on the words, also out, which is a real constraint at a technical college where a diploma is a common credential. Section 59-111-25 protects the benefit from a midyear budget reduction, which matters because this is a tuition waiver the institutions absorb rather than an appropriation, and Section 59-111-180 makes misrepresenting eligibility an offence. Applications go to the Department of Veterans' Affairs, not to the institution, and the department approves before the institution waives.