Congress has approved a major update to the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) GI Bill® Comparison Tool, a public website that helps veterans and their families compare colleges and universities. The changes come through the Senator Elizabeth Dole 21st Century Veterans Healthcare and Benefits Improvement Act, signed into law in early 2025, and are intended to improve transparency, accountability, and consumer protection for military-affiliated students.
The Comparison Tool was originally created following a 2012 executive order (Principles of Excellence) that set basic standards for how schools should treat veterans, servicemembers, and their dependents. Those standards were meant to curb deceptive recruiting, misleading marketing, and other abusive practices tied to federal education benefits like the Post-9/11 GI Bill and Department of Defense Tuition Assistance. While the principles existed on paper, enforcement and meaningful oversight never fully materialized. “Complaints” can be submitted, but the system offers little visibility, follow-through, or coordination across federal agencies, nor does it allow the public to read the complaints.
The new law requires the VA to maintain and modernize the Comparison Tool, preserve at least six years of historical data, and expand standardized, outcome-based disclosures. For policymakers, researchers, journalists, and veterans themselves, the statute effectively creates a durable federal dataset that did not previously exist in one place.
Under the law, the VA must now track, retain, and prominently display data that includes:
- Historical institutional data for at least six years, ensuring trends and changes over time remain visible rather than overwritten
• Average annual cost and total cost of programs, including associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, and other credentials
• Program availability and average time to completion for each program offered
• Completion counts for veterans and other beneficiaries, broken down by degree type, certificate, or professional license
• Completion and non-completion outcomes, disaggregated by type of beneficiary and by use of VA education benefits
• Employment rates and median earnings of graduates after completion, broken out by program and benefit usage
• Annual enrollment counts of VA education beneficiaries at each institution and within specific programs
• Student feedback and complaints, along with institutional responses, retained and publicly accessible for no less than six years
Congress also directed the VA to coordinate with the Department of Education and other federal agencies through formal data-sharing agreements, and to train VA education counselors on proper use of the tool. Together, these changes move the Comparison Tool from a largely informational website to a meaningful accountability and analysis platform—one that gives veterans, policymakers, and the public clearer insight into how schools actually perform once veterans’ benefits are on the line.
About the Author
Matthew Feehan, J.D., is a U.S. Army National Guard veteran and former infantry officer with extensive experience across military, legal, and federal contracting domains. As a Senior Policy Advisor at the Veterans Education Project, he brings a uniquely practical perspective to veterans’ policy, drawing from years of hands-on
