The war in Iraq has been controversial from the beginning. But respect for our soldiers has been constant. Even those who opposed the invasion agree with the bumper sticker on my friend's pickup truck: "Support the warrior, not the war."

But when it comes to education, the warriors are not getting what they deserve. Many of them look to go to college when they return from active duty, but they're not getting the education benefits they've earned, benefits soldiers got after other conflicts.

Congress passed the Serviceman's Readjustment Act in 1944, a GI Bill of Rights for vets of World War II. Part of that bill provided education benefits. Similar bills were passed for veterans of the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.

How do today's benefits compare?

The Congressional Research Service prepared a report last January to answer that question for members of Congress.

Because hard data for World War II veterans' college costs is hard to find, most of the comparisons are for 1987 to 2007. (Do you think college costs have gone up just a bit in the last 60 years? The Research Service has a footnote: "based on anecdotal evidence, tuition and fees at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were $450 and $500, respectively, in the 1940s.")

According to the Research Service, a 1987 vet received enough to pay for 88 percent of college costs (tuition, room, board, fees) at a four-year public college. Today, what he or she gets pays for only 73 percent of the cost at a public university, leaving $3,683 for the soldier to pay per year.

(Plattsburgh State estimates its 2008 cost to be $14,192, so a vet's benefit would be only 70 percent at Plattsburgh. That leaves a balance of $4,258 for this year.)

If a veteran went to a private college in 1987, the GI Bill covered 37 percent of the cost; now it covers 31.

Clearly, veterans' education benefits haven't kept pace with college costs.

Most upsetting, as we enter our sixth year in Iraq, the purchasing power of the benefits has dropped from 83 percent in 2003 and 2004 to 73 percent now. The longer we're there, the less help we give our soldiers when they return.

National Guard and Reserve soldiers have an additional concern. We all know that these men and women have served multiple tours in the Middle East conflicts. But their education benefits are based on their single-longest activation. The soldier's shorter tours, no matter how many of them, don't count towards his or her education benefits.

The cost of the war in Iraq is well over $500 billion. You might remember some very conservative estimates before the war began, as well as the theory that Iraq would be able to finance its own reconstruction. Those "experts" were wrong.

The National Priorities Project estimates that we're spending $341 million a day in this war. New York state has contributed about $47 billion to that effort and will pitch in another $7.9 billion in 2008.

And yet, our veterans are not getting what they got in 1987. With all that spending, we're not investing in the readjustment of the men and women who volunteered to make us safer.