Penn was ranked the top Ivy League school for veterans

Penn is the top Ivy League school for veterans, according to the newest edition of the U.S. News Best Colleges Rankings. 

Penn was named the third-best school overall for veterans in the ranking, after Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It tied for third with Duke University. Dartmouth College was the next-highest Ivy on the list, ranked fifth.

Schools on this list must meet three requirements to be listed as a top school for veterans. Schools that met the criteria were then ranked in descending order based on their 2017 Best Colleges ranks. 

The first two criteria relate to the G.I. Bill. Schools listed in this category must be certified for the bill, and must also have 20 or more students who used G.I. Bill benefits to partially or fully finance their tuition and fees during the 2015-16 academic year.

There were 193 recipients of veterans’ benefits at Penn in fall 2015, according to Director of Media Relations Ron Ozio. The majority of these recipients were veterans themselves.

179 veterans received veterans’ benefits in fall 2015. There were 40 undergraduate veterans and 139 graduate student veterans.

There also were 14 recipients who were dependents of veterans. Four of these dependents were undergraduates and 10 were graduate students.

Finally, the school must participate in the Yellow Ribbon Program — a provision of the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 2008.

Universities with this program voluntarily enter into an agreement with the Department of Veterans Affairs to fund expenses that exceed the tuition and fee amounts payable under the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill. The Department of Veterans Affairs then matches the school’s payments.

For the academic year 2016-17, Penn’s contributions under the Yellow Ribbon Program range from 4,000 dollars in the Annenberg School for Communications and in the Graduate School of Education to 20,000 dollars in the Law School and in the Perelman School of Medicine. 

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