You know, as someone who isn't all that far removed from being a college student, I must admit I saw something today that was pretty cool to learn. I saw that one of the schools I previously attended here in New York State earned themselves a special award recently.

That school is SUNY Orange and the award they earned was a 'special designation', a silver medal for being one of the most 'military friendly' schools in all of America.

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SUNY Orange Latest Designation and Award-Winning Past

The award recently bestowed to SUNY Orange goes for the 2023-2024 Academic Year. This continues a string of awards or designations in recent years by SUNY orange as they have received numerous 'Military Friendly' designations from the same organization in the past.

SUNY Orange has been incredibly successful with these military-friendly designations as this newest award will count as the school's 8th in the past 11 years.

For the 2022-2023 academic year, SUNY Orange was awarded its first Silver Designation, 2023-2024 is its second.

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What is 'Military Friendly'?

Military Friendly is as the name suggests; they are an organization that analyzes certain aspects affiliated with places like schools or a business and essentially gives an overall score based on specific criteria and assesses how well these institutions handle and treat the military personnel that work at or attend these institutions.

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Military Friendly also has a very specific process to distributing their special designations. The process begins with filling out a survey. In the case of SUNY Orange, they were 1 out of 1800 other schools to take part in the survey. Out of the 1800 schools that participated in the survey, 530 schools were awarded the special designation awards. The awards are ranked like the Olympics where you may receive a bronze, silver or gold medal.

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Ratings for each school were determined by using publicly available data about the schools as well as the school's responses to the survey questions. Multiple categories or 'thresholds' make up a school's overall score. Those thresholds are...

Retention, Graduation, Job Placement, Repayment, Persistence, and Loan Default rates for all students and specifically, for student veterans.

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I've said it on numerous occasions but our military personnel and first responders deserve a lot for the jobs that they do in protecting us regular people every day. As a graduate of SUNY Orange, it makes me quite happy to see that my former school is a place that does give back and helps our vets and military personnel.

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