The Army and Air Force have reopened their Tuition Assistance pipelines to service members — following a Congressional mandate — yet similar funding remains stalled within the Marine Corps, a leading veterans’ advocate complained Wednesday.

The federal sequestration had previously blockaded all money that’s normally funneled to troops to help them pay for college classes in order to further their educations and their military careers. In most branches, that tab reaches $4,500 per year for each service member who takes the classes.

On March 21, Congress voted to order the Defense Department to locate the necessary funding to relaunch Tuition Assistance across the branches. That directive has now become law. Navy leaders had already opted to keep that program alive for sailors despite sequestration, “and we’re quite proud of that, too,” said Lt. Shawn Eklund, a Navy spokesman.

At midnight Tuesday, the Army turned on the web portal used by soldiers to formally ask for Tuition Assistance money.

“This will allow soldiers to request Tuition Assistance for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. For the balance of (this year), the eligibility rules for use of TA, the $250 semester-hour cap, and the annual ceiling of $4,500 remain unchanged,” said Lt. Col. S. Justin Platt, an Army spokesman.

On Wednesday, the Air Force also reinstated Tuition Assistance for its members, said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Laurel Tingley.

"The program is going to remain exactly the same as it was before the suspension," Tingley said. 

Marine Corps public affairs officers didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions on when that branch will again offer Tuition Assistance.

“Here’s the issue: It’s been passed by Congress and signed by the president. There’s no reason this shouldn’t (already) be reinstated at the branch level,” said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a support network with more than 500 campus chapters.

At some military posts, including North Carolina’s Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the attendance of Marines who once used on-base college classes has been cut by more than half since DOD halted all tuition help amid the sequestration, Dakduk said.

“It’s absolutely extreme,” he added. “And that’s exactly kind of thing we don’t want to see as far as supporting service members. Especially as our military force in total begins to draw down and we have folks exit the military.”

Related:

• It's official: Navy grounds Blue Angels for remainder of 2013
• Tens of thousands of veterans homeless despite billions in spending

The insult expressed in the Rutgers University class was aimed at the nearly 1 million veterans enrolled at U.S. schools under the GI Bill. And Scott Hakim, barely a year removed from combat, took the slam personally.

“Why should we pay for these guys to go to college?” Hakim said he recalls a female student asking during a discussion on the nation’s responsibility to service members returning from war.  “Everybody who goes into the military is stupid – that’s why they joined the military instead of going to college.”

John Agnello Photography

Scott Hakim, a Marine infantryman in combat, now attends Rutgers University. The school has a military-friendly reputation. But even there, Hakim says he heard another student bash enrolled veterans. Hakim at a recent wedding with girlfriend Emma Valenti.

Hakim – a Marine infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan – immediately vowed to out-study every classmate on the midterm exam and said he ultimately posted the highest mark: 98 out of 100. Later, he said, he overheard that same female student reveal her grade: F. 

“I guess I proved her wrong,” Hakim said. “It wasn't a me-versus-her thing, more like: Maybe now she realizes how idiotic her statement was.”

Anti-veteran sentiments – though sporadic and scattered – are nonetheless emerging at some American colleges just as thousands of veterans enroll with their tuition fees fully covered by the post-9/11 GI Bill. In student gatherings or via anonymous posts in online forums, some university students are expressing open disdain for former service members now massing in academia.

Student Veterans of America, a support network with more than 500 campus chapters, acknowledges the presence of some unwelcoming vibes. “It exists,” said Michael Dakduk, executive director of SVA. “But, by and large, college students respect the sacrifices made by those who have served in the military.”

At Columbia University in New York City, a wounded Iraq War veteran was heckled and booed in February by fellow students as he argued for the return to that school of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, or ROTC, during a campus meeting. That reaction angered the national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who openly questioned the school’s leadership.

At the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, student veteran Jason Thigpen said he has “personally experienced what seems to be ‘anti-veteran’ sentiment on more than a few occasions.”

Courtesy of Scott Hakim

Scott Hakim served with the U.S. Marines in Iraq and again in Afghanistan, where he was wounded by an IED in 2010.

“I had a History 101 professor in 2011 actually refer to how much better he was than military service members,” said Thigpen, an Army National Guard member who served in Iraq through January 2010. The UNC “system seems to disregard us in such a widespread manner, most student veterans no longer bother to even admit their time in-service, which is just sad.”

UNC, Wilmington spokeswoman Janine Iamunno responded: "UNC Wilmington proudly offers veterans, active-duty members of the military, and their families several programs and resources to support their unique educational needs. This is an extension of our commitment to  the journey of learning, and to the premium we place on an open dialogue between faculty and students about the opportunities and challenges we face individually and as a community."

At Rutgers, meanwhile, there is irony attached to the unfriendly dig uttered in one of Hakim’s classes. That sort of behavior is well out of the norm, he said: “Other than that one time, Rutgers has been absolutely amazing.” In Afghanistan, Hakim’s vehicles ran over and detonated five IEDs. On a sixth occasion, he stepped on an IED, sustaining a traumatic brain injury. “If I have to miss a class (due to the injury), my professors are accommodating. The whole school itself is great with veterans.”

"Rutgers, like the rest of the country, has successfully been able to separate the warrior from the war," said Steve Abel, a retired Army colonel and director of the office of veteran military programs and services at Rutgers.

More on military topics at NBCNews.com

• Both female officers drop out of grueling Marine Corps infantry course
• Report: Arizona Army National Guard recruiters hunted homeless with paintballs
• 'I can't afford to live like this': VA weeks, months late paying student veterans

"I was on a college campus around the time of (the) Kent State (shootings). I'm a product of the Vietnam era. So when I was driving here (a couple of years ago to start the job), I wondered: What is Rutgers going to be like from a staff and student body perspective, being a big and liberal university?" Abel said. "Any apprehension I had about that relationship absolutely dissolved when I got here. They could not have been more welcoming to me, my team and to the student veterans here."

In fact, Rutgers was rated a “military friendly” school in the 2013 “G.I. Jobs” list of colleges where veterans feel appreciated and have an array of academic and social help available.

Last month, when NBC News reported on the latest list of “military friendly” schools, several readers offered comments via newsvine.com that derided the nation's newest veterans.

“This post-9/11 love affair with the military is disgusting. Paying people to illegally invade other countries and kill innocent men, women and children is immoral. Screw the military,” wrote a reader who calls herself OVUgirl.

“I have to agree with OVUgirl. Seeing the immoral military glorified on campus is disgusting,” wrote another reader who uses the newsvine handle Gandhi Fan.

Through newsvine, NBC News asked both of those readers to elaborate on their comments for this story. Neither responded.

“I don’t think you’ll see (those types of feelings expressed) as overtly on the ground at college campuses,” said SVA leader Dakduk. “But ... you can say things anonymously online – you can say pretty much everything – so that’s where you’ll see it most.”

Another leading veterans group suspects that some student veterans who blatantly grab GI Bill money with no plans to actually sit in a college classroom are further fueling that ill will.

Under the post-9/11 GI Bill, the federal government directly reimburses colleges for a veteran’s tuition fees. In addition, each student veteran receives a housing allowance that, depending on the university’s zip code, can run as high as $2,040 per month if the veteran has dependents. They also each get $1,000 annually for books and supplies.

“What happens is that too many of the people get the GI Bill and don’t go to class. They spend the money elsewhere and the college has to cut them loose,” said John E. Pickens III, executive director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has offered financial counseling to more than 150,000 current and former service members. 

“That’s one of the issues that kind of took us by surprise,” he added. “When we go to these colleges and ask: How can we help? That’s one of the things we hear from the student advisers: ‘Look, I’ve got kids who come here and enroll to get their GI Bill and they end up not going to school.' 

“Unfortunately," Pickens said, "you have some folks who game the system." 

More content from NBCNews.com:

• Video: Family, friends remember Jessica Ridgeway at memorial
• Five bodies found at scene of Denver bar fire
• Jogger killed in police shootout in California
• Fastest US land animal, the pronghorn, gets help crossing highway

Follow US news from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Lucas Velasquez

Lucas Velasquez takes part in a medical training drill performed outside Fallujah. Velasquez, a Navy corpsman, is carrying the stretcher in the front.

During a pair of six-month stints in and around Fallujah, Iraq –- then a fiercely volatile city –- Navy corpsman Lucas Velasquez came to know about life.

And death.

From late 2005 through early 2007, not long after nearly 100 U.S. troops and more than 1,350 insurgents were killed in Fallujah during Operation Phantom Fury, Velasquez routinely rendered emergency aid to wounded Marines while ducking bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and IED blasts. In uniform, Velasquez was smart and quick, adept at practicing field medicine literally while under the gun.

In 2007, after retiring from the Navy, Velasquez, then 23, enrolled at Columbus State University in western Georgia. He promptly failed four of his first six classes.

Lucas Velasquez

Lucas Velasquez enrolled at Columbus State University in Georgia after retiring from the Navy. He is pictured on the bottom, second from the right, with his Kappa Sigma fraternity brothers.

"It was a struggle," he said.

Velasquez hadn’t been in a classroom for more than five years. Instead of taking strategic lecture notes or studying highlights in the syllabus when prepping for exams, he scribbled nearly every word his professors uttered and tried to absorb every fact in his textbooks. Deeper, there was a vast cultural chasm between other freshmen and the survivor of multiple firefights and risky missions.

“At 19, I was in combat as opposed to trying to go find a party,” said Velasquez, injured before he came home. “They really don’t realize how precious life can be, how it can go away in the drop of a dime. They’re more worried about what they’re going to be wearing to school tomorrow, or the spring break that’s coming up. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just two different people.”

Among the approximately 800,000 military veterans now attending U.S. colleges, an estimated 88 percent drop out of school during their first year and only 3 percent graduate, according a report forwarded by the University of Colorado Denver, citing a March 22, 2012 study by the Colorado Workforce Development Council.

Related: Company accused of deception turns GIBill.com over to VA

Scores of former servicemen and servicewomen who are among the best in the world at defusing bombs, tracking the enemy, patching bloody limbs, or negotiating with wary Afghans become futilely lost when trying to author an English paper.

Indeed, the vast, life-experience divide between war veterans and teens fresh out of high school – all now sharing the same classrooms – can make the scholastic transition awkward and arduous for ex-soldiers, said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a support network for ex-military college students. SVA now has chapters on more than 500 campuses

Mix in the fat gap of time between the vets’ high school days and their attempts to blend into college life and the reasons for the dropout rate become even more obvious.

“They are (taking) academically rigorous courses after being removed from the academic setting for so long,” Dakduk said.

“I didn’t know how to study,” Velasquez said of his first months at Columbus State. “In the military classes (we had taken), they spoon fed you everything because they didn’t want you to fail. It was a struggle going from a structured lifestyle to one where everything is on you.”

A number of colleges – Dakduk mentioned the University of Arizona, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, Purdue University, Columbia University and Dartmouth College – offer well-crafted services that truly help retired military folks thrive in the college classroom.

But some schools falsely sell themselves as “military friendly” simply to attract veterans on the G.I. Bill when, in reality, they don’t have the adequate infrastructure or counselors to help former soldiers succeed, Velasquez said. After his initial failures, Velasquez had to independently seek external tutoring. He eventually boosted his grade point average to 3.8.

Related: Pentagon, Congress eye new payday loan rules

Under the post-9/11 G.I. Bill, the federal government covers up to 100 percent of veterans’ tuition and fees. That money goes directly to the colleges, making the ex-servicemen and servicewomen financially attractive enrollees.

Earlier this year, SVA revoked chapters at 26 for-profit colleges that failed to meet the organization's requirements, mainly having a student-veteran – not an administrator – run the chapter. Those booted schools included the Art Institute of New York City, Brown Mackie College in Akron, Ohio, DeVry University in Orlando, Fla., ECPI College of Technology in Raleigh, N.C., and ITT Technical Institute in South Bend, Ind.

The misleading, so-called military-friendly sales pitch made by some colleges to attract vets, Velasquez said, is a big reason for the dropout rate.

“There was a concern around certain predatory, for-profit schools using our brand to legitimize their programs,” Dakduk said. (He added that better statistics are needed to precisely calculate the veteran dropout rate; the post-9/11 G.I. Bill was enacted three years ago, which means, Dakduk said, not enough time has passed to gauge its impact on today’s enrolled ex-soldiers.)

In August 2011, Velasquez transferred to the University of Colorado Denver after getting married. (He had been to Colorado earlier in his life and purposely picked the state for a new start). UCD, he learned, had a three-tiered system to help vets transition from military to college, stay in school and then move from graduation to the workforce. As part of that program, the school assigns an upperclassman to incoming ex-military students to mentor them socially and academically. It’s based on a similar program used at U.S. military bases.

“What we try to facilitate with that is the camaraderie -- the community -- because that’s one of the biggest things (ex-military) people miss,” said Cameron Cook, head of UCD’s veteran student services. “It’s one of the hardest things: missing your team, your friends in the military. That’s really hard to let go.”

A retired Marine, Cook soon e-mailed Velasquez and invited him to participate in the program.

“This is perfect, just what veterans need, something that helps them take that veteran experience and use it in college,” Velasquez said.

Related: Feds move to help out underwater military homeowners

Cook and his team also try to help vets who carry to campus “the invisible injuries” of war –- post-traumatic stress disorder.

“When they get out of the military, the average student veteran is so focused on transition into college, finding a place to live, getting on the G.I. Bill. They’re very busy reintegrating,” Cook said. “But then, after that first year, everything kind of slows down and that’s when the shadows come in.”

The “shadows” of PTSD, including rampant anxiety and sleeplessness, often are triggered by daily stress – for example, by exams.

“We see a big increase [in students presenting with PTSD symptoms] right at midterms and it grows exponentially until finals,” Cook said.

“One student told me that at the beginning of every semester he feels like he’s getting ready to go on a deployment,” Cook said. “And you can parallel finals to being like miniature battles.” 

“And I’ve had other students say: ‘I don’t know why I’m stressed about a biology test when I was in Fallujah. Why am I stressed about this when I’ve been through so much previously?’ The reason is: the Fallujah experience gets linked to the stress of midterms. They already have stress and then academic stresses just build on that.”

Or, as one retired non-commissioned officer who attends UCD summed up the challenges of the veteran-college experience and high dropout rate: "I was the man in the military. We had so much responsibility [overseas], people's lives were on the line. Now I'm sitting next to an 18-year-old and I'm struggling to keep up with him in this class."

Bill Briggs is a frequent contributor to msnbc.com and author of “The Third Miracle.” 

More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Chicago gun buyback raises money for NRA kids camp
• Report: Homeless man scammed luxury hotel stays at others' expense
• Texas student mauled by chimps undergoes 6 hours of surgery
• 3 Boy Scouts, scoutmaster killed in head-on Wyoming crash
• Video: Caught on tape: Adults behaving badly

Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook