5 years in the military for no student loans

I got an Navy Reserved Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship that covered 100% of my college tuition at an out of state private university. Now I’m in the military, commissioned as an officer, halfway through my 5 year service commitment in the Navy required of scholarship recipients after graduation, building my first startup LooseLeaf. Many people I talked to didn’t know what ROTC scholarship existed and reacted negatively to the idea of the 5 year service commitment in the military after you get your college degree. I hope sharing my experience of how I heard about this scholarship and my process of applying to it can help more high schoolers who are applying to colleges and financial aid, and especially parents with high-school age children, make more informed decisions about practical ways to fund their higher education.

How I heard about this ROTC scholarship

I first heard about the ROTC scholarship in the beginning of my senior year in high school when I went to an information meeting with an Army Major about applying West Point. I looked into applying military schools because college tuition was on the rise and we were in the midst of the great recession in 2008. I was worried about job security after college. The Army Major was very personable and some casual chitchat later, I told him the major real reason I wanted to apply to West Point was because the military academy lets you get a college degree for free. I also told him that being in the military was not an aspiration or passion of mine and I would not do more than the 5 years of mandatory service. Despite me not being full-heartedly committed to serve in the military, he was empathetic that a life in the military is not for everyone, but nonetheless encouraged me to look at another option to get a free college education at any college of my choosing, studying anything I want, namely, the ROTC scholarship.

This was a much more attractive offer looked a heck of a lot easier to apply to than a military academy. Unlike applying to military academies, applying to ROTC scholarships does not require a congressional nomination and a physical fitness test as a part of the application process. I went home and researched the ROTC scholarship a bit online. The Army, Navy, and Air force each offered its own version of the scholarship but each service has a few unique career paths.

I researched the ROTC scholarship a bit but didn’t apply to it immediately, which was a mistake. I wasn’t sensitive to the cost aspect of higher education filtered my college search mainly based on how prestigious the university was and how good the engineering program was. I applied to my reach school, Carnegie Mellon, early decision. It’s a private university that cost $67,980 per year for undergrads to attend in 2016.

Honestly, my criteria for picking this college to attend was purely based on its reputation and prestigious engineering college. Going into a technical field like engineering was the only thing I was sure about at the time because I knew since I was 9 that I wanted to be an engineer like my grandfather. I wish I paid more attention to the cost of tuition before I applied to this extremely expensive out-of-state school. I wish I understood better what that number meant and immediate and future impact of my decision to go there.

When I found out I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon early decision in December 2008, I had no clue how I was going to pay for it or how much financial aid I was able to get because I didn’t submit FAFSA yet. The ROTC scholarship was in my back pocket, but I wanted to explore other options like the Gates Millennium Scholarship, which also covers full tuition but with no strings attached. I thought I had a shot in those other scholarships and qualified for more financial aid (grants and subsidized loans) than I did given my family’s working class background.

Faced with the college bill

After dozens of rejections for scholarships to which I applied and high school graduation around the corner, I was faced with this bill for 2009–2010 academic year:

Minus all the aids “awarded” to me, I still had to pay about $16,000 out of pocket. What could I have done to come up with that money in 4 months and for the next 4 years? I could rely on private loans and working part-time to make up that difference. The prospect of finding a job was grim in the economy of 2009 and both McDonald’s and KFC rejected my application to work there part-time or in the summer. I had about $6,000 in my own savings account, which came from all the $5/day lunch money I saved throughout 4 years of high school and the red envelop money I got since I was an infant. My parents took all the money they had in their savings account, which was just over $10,000. So very reluctantly, we parted ways with the last of our savings and paid the $16,000 remainder for the first year tuition.

Having a degree doesn’t guarantee a job anymore. So why are we so desperate to have a college degree?

In 2009, there was no question that a college degree was absolutely required for having the career deemed acceptable by society for a respectable person to have; Coursera didn’t exist in 2009 and we didn’t have people like Mike Rowe telling us that having a blue collar job is also respectable and may be more rewarding career. I would love to get more into the paradox within the current student loan dilemma but that’s another story.

Recognizing that I couldn’t rely on our savings to pay for the 2010–2011 academic year and it’s inevitable that some sacrifices has to be made. The question became what sacrifice am I willing to make for this degree? Would I rather get into crippling debt from private loans, or work part time while being a student or take a gap year to work? (Would I rather want Hilary Clinton to be President or Donald Trump? Pick your poison.)

I revisited the ROTC scholarship application; the “cost” of getting this scholarship pale in comparison to being in a lifelong debt or spending 8 years to finally getting a degree by cycling between working at a low paying job and being a full time student, which was exactly someone I know had done. The “cost” of getting an ROTC scholarship seems like a wonderful career opportunity in an economy in which a college degree does not guarantee a job anymore.

I ended up deciding on applying to the Navy ROTC scholarship because there are many career paths in the Navy that are pretty engineering-based and aligns very well with my interests in engineering and lack of interest in participating in combat. The thing that caught my eyes the most was the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP), which is a small but important subset of the Navy that specializes in designing, maintaining, and operating the nuclear reactors that power aircraft carriers and submarines. In particular, I was drawn to a career track within the NNPP called Naval Reactors Engineer, which is what I ended up doing. The work environment is akin to a regular engineering job and you get to work and live in Washington D.C.

The Navy recruiter basically applied to the scholarship for me.

I was surprised how easy the application for the ROTC scholarship was. I basically went to a recruiting center and asked about the scholarship. All I had to do was to fill out an online application at the recruiting center, which took about 15 minutes and asked for a short paragraph on why you want this scholarship and why you want to serve in the military. After the initial screening, I proceed to an interview and that was all. The recruiter did most of the work, put together all the paperwork for me, went to my high school to pick up my report card on my behalf, and even picked me up from home and drove me to the interview.

I picked up the scholarship in my sophomore year and my bill looked like this:

Tuition keeps going up as usual, but I no longer have to come up with $16,000 or not be allowed to be a student. I applied to financial aid to get small amounts of federal loans to cover the cost of living, like getting an apartment off campus.

In Retrospect

I’m very glad I got the scholarship because I think being debt-free and in a good financial situation creates the precondition for someone to pursue higher order aspirations. After I graduated, I had a little over $25,000 student loans from my first year when I didn’t have the scholarship and some small loans the subsequent years. I paid all that back in less than 18 months while serving in the military. The cost/benefit of the ROTC scholarship:

What I got with this scholarship

• 100% college tuition coverage getting any degree you want at any university you want.
• A guaranteed job after college (very important at the time given the state of the economy in 2008).
• A few hundred dollars per semester of book allowance.
• A few hundred dollars per month of subsistence allowance (basically pocket money). I got $150 a month as a freshman, $250 a month as a sophomore, $300 as a sophomore, $350 as a sophomore, and $400 as a senior.

Not all military jobs require going into battle. I’m extremely lucky to get to work at Naval Reactors. It’s a 9 to 5 desk job, Monday through Friday, going on work travel occasionally to Seattle, Idaho, Pittsburgh, and Charleston to attend meetings. I make enough money to live very comfortably in a nice apartment in the center of Washington, DC, and best of all, I can take days off from work anytime I want to work on my software startup. Entrepreneurship is my true passion and I can’t imagine doing that if I were $300K in debt.

What I would lose by taking this scholarship

• Opportunity cost. Freedom to get a job of your chosen field. You must serve in the military, doing whatever they want you to do as an officer for 5 years of your life after you get your bachelor’s degree; if you don’t, you must pay all the tuition money back to the military/taxpayer in full!
• Maybe you don’t get to party as hard? No drugs, no drinking if you are under 21. The ROTC unit regularly conduct random drug testing.
• Having to take some extra classes about the military and participate in physical training (we call them PT) with the ROTC unit at 6 in the morning 2–3 times a week.

In retrospect, I think the biggest thing for me is the opportunity cost. If you had the option to do A or B, and you choose to do A, then you don’t have the time or money to do B. The cost of pursuing option A is missing out on what B could have offered you. I studied electrical and computer engineering at a university well known for its excellent program and employment rate from this major. If I weren’t serving in the military, I would probably be living in San Francisco or NYC working in the Tech industry and building startups, like most of my college friends are currently. However, there’s no guarantee that working on things you are passionate about makes you happier or gives you a higher quality of life. If I still had to deal with $100K of student loans, intensely monitoring my spending and imposing tight budgets and constraint on my lifestyle, I wouldn’t feel comfortable working on entrepreneurship, or move to an expensive city like San Francisco looking to work at a startup for equity in return. I’d probably end up working at a job I don’t feel passionate about because it guarantees an income that you need to make those payments every month.

Accepting the ROTC scholarship probably means you can’t work in your chosen field right out of college, unless your dream job is to be in the military. But in the grand scheme of things, I would take military over student loans. 5 years of guaranteed job, no student loans versus 10 to 15 years of indenture servitude and being shackled to a job you hate because your student loans holds you back from pursuing your true passions. The math works out.