Tennessee STRONG Act Tuition Reimbursement

The Support, Training and Renewing Opportunity for National Guardsmen Act, the STRONG Act, reimburses tuition for a serving member of the Tennessee National Guard. Section 49-4-1005 carries the eligibility conditions. Four requirements run together. The member must be in good standing and currently active in the Tennessee National Guard. The member must maintain satisfactory academic progress, meaning a minimum 2.0 grade point average for an undergraduate, vocational or technical program and 3.0 for a master's program, for the term being claimed. A member eligible for federal tuition assistance must apply for and use it. And the application for reimbursement must be submitted within forty-five days of course completion. The forty-five day deadline is the one that costs people money, because it runs from completion rather than from the end of the academic year, and it is short enough that a member who deploys or goes to annual training right after finals can miss it without noticing. This is reimbursement and it pays last. The amount is offset and reduced by the aggregate amount of state and federal education financial assistance the member received, naming Pell Grants, GI Bill benefits, Tennessee Promise and federal tuition assistance. A member whose tuition is already covered by other sources has nothing left for the STRONG Act to reimburse. That is a deliberate design and it is the single most misunderstood thing about the program. The caps in the statute are 130 semester hours toward a first bachelor's degree, 40 toward a first master's degree, and 24 toward a vocational or technical certificate, with an additional 30 semester hour exemption allowed for officer programs. Those caps are worth checking against what the administering agency publishes, because they disagree, and the reason is a recent act. The Tennessee Military Department's state tuition assistance page states a limit of 120 undergraduate credit hours, inclusive of transfer or previously awarded hours. That was the statute until Public Chapter 334 of 2025, signed May 8, 2025 and effective on becoming law, struck "one hundred twenty (120) semester hours" from 49-4-1005(3), substituted one hundred thirty, and deleted the alternative limit of eight full-time equivalent semesters. The page is describing the repealed figure; the statute's 130 governs. The same act changed what the program pays and who is shut out. Section 49-4-1004(b) now has the Department of Military pay a public institution one hundred percent of the maximum resident in-state tuition plus undergraduate course fees or master's program fees in an amount the department sets by policy, published on its website by August 1 each year, less the other assistance in 49-4-1005. And a new subdivision makes a member suspended from federal tuition assistance for academic performance or recoupment ineligible for the state reimbursement too, alongside the existing rule that a member on an ROTC scholarship must exhaust it first. The institution has to be a Tennessee college of applied technology, a regionally accredited community college, a four-year public university, or a private school whose primary campus is in Tennessee. The member must still be serving when the term ends, so a member who separates mid-semester loses the claim for that term.