There seem like ALOT of National Guard members at UNG compared to other SMCs. I wonder why this is....
At cadet admissions, I will say that in the financial portion of the parent and prospective meetings, they stress National Guard as a way to pay for school. They did rather make it sound like an easy thing, as easy as 1-2-3.
1- Join guard, go to basics
2- Drill on campus
3- Upon graduation, you will be honorably discharged in order to accept your commission in AD.
And oh yeah, they'll pay you money for weekend drills and pay your tuition! They made it sound like a no-brainer. Join the guard to pay for school. I do not think they were trying to snow anybody. I just think, now that I know a little more about it, that none of this is really as easy as they make it out to be. The whole "drill on campus" thing is more like ... drill on campus until you have 60 credit hours, and then there's a good chance your unit will want you to drill in Atlanta or Athens or Central Florida or something, so you'll need a car and gas money and time to travel away from campus, and hopefully the unit's drill weekend isn't concurrent with ROTC FTX weekends, and since it doesn't always coincide there's a good chance you'll have to deal with paperwork to try to get drill weekends changed. And then there's the issue of the summer training falling at times concurrent with other ROTC training ops, and the issue of getting summer training moved to your home state if you don't live in Georgia. And the issue of there being HUGE questions about how truly easy it is to switch from NG to AD upon graduation.
Don't get me wrong though. The people in cadet admissions are caring, sincere people who answer questions quickly and thoroughly. They probably even went into some of these issues during admissions meetings, but you know, after a while your brain starts to blank out. There are a lot of cadets at UNG involved in Guard, so it must be working out for many.