There are a lot of problems with serving on Active Duty and trying to attend classes. Many Servicemembers find it daunting and difficult, and for that reason many choose to wait to attend college until after their military enlistment is up. However there are those brave souls who work to try and do both, to serve on Active Duty and to take classes at the same time. To recognize and support those efforts, the Department of Defense has worked with each of the Armed Services, and created a series of partnerships with schools, universities and colleges.
This series of partnerships has formed the Servicemember Opportunity College system. The Servicemember Opportunity College program is a group of colleges and universities numbering over 1700 schools, that are joined together to try and make college and getting an education not as difficult for members of the United States Armed Forces. It can be difficult to be on active duty and attempting to go to school, so the SOC colleges have began to look at the situation and are working to brainstorm solutions to some of the problems that active duty sailors face who want to attend school while on active duty.
DANTES, and the Department of Defense fund the SOC association program, and in it the schools have came together and agreed to pool their resources to increase ways for Servicemembers to attend college. The different schools look for ways to simplify credit transfers, and to accept more of each others courses and requirements for transfer. More and more of the SOC member schools are working to establish online and distance learning units for their respective schools. The program of SOC just began to publish its own user guide, called “The SOC Consortium Guide,” and this catalog has detailed information about each of the member’s schools, contact information about each school, as well as general SOC polices.
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The SOC is pushing hard for national In State Tuition for all military Servicemembers. This means that they wish to establish a law that anyone serving in the Military can attend any university and pay the “In state tuition” rate, because they are in the military. This is seen as a big step to making education more affordable and more attractive to the Servicemembers.