MyCAA to be assessed; outlook not good...

According to the January 17 issue of Army Times,

Pentagon officials will assess the costs of providing education opportunities for military spouses as an incentive to retain service members, compared with the costs of recruiting and training new service members.

What they're referring to is the My Career Advancement Accounts (MyCAA) that started in 2009, which paid for a spouse's education toward a "mobile career." In February 2010, because of a flood of applications, the Department of Defense abruptly shut down the program "because a flood of applications threatened to drain its funding. " [page 9]

In October, DOD reinstated the program, but with a few modifications. First, the maximum award was lowered from $6,000 to $4,000. Second, it was only open to spouses of enlisted soldiers E-1 through E-5, the two lowest grades of warrant officers, and commissioned officers O-1 and O-2.

I think it's that second modification that will cause the Pentagon to kill the program. I can understand why DOD made the limitation -- generally the other grades get paid more -- but as a retention incentive it's a non-issue.

The grades to which the program has been limited are typically still under service obligations. An OCS lieutenant like me is obligated for three years; by the time I finish with that, I'm an O-3 captain, and thus ineligible. Junior enlisted soldiers are in similar situations. They're only eligible when they're already stuck.

As a retention tool, then, MyCAA is pretty much worthless. Although I love the idea and my wife will take advantage of it this coming summer, she'll use up that $4,000 long before I have to make a decision on how long I want to stay in.

I don't expect it to last much longer.