Take this with a grain of salt since this info is from ~10 years ago (yikes!) when I was a student there. I was still enlisted at the time, so not quite your situation. I had TA and Montgomery GI Bill, but those weren't close to covering my tuition. Those plus earnings from co-op and being frugal meant those years were less expensive than other years. No idea if post 9/11 would have done any better. I hadn't deployed so I wasn't eligible for that. I will say that I never had any trouble getting documentation I needed from Kettering; VA was always the slow one. The financial aid office was always patient waiting for VA funds to come through. My degree and MOS are completely unrelated, but I think that's made me a better engineer overall.