The Unofficial SMART Scholarship Forum

You'll need to review the authorizing legislation, and I think there are some extremely old threads related to this, but I believe the secretary of defense can also discharge your debt. It's not actually Carter who does this, there's a very large civil staff to manage all manner of requests. Probably need to petition your state representative to formally ask.

Was looking for a post like this. It's been a while - how did it all turn out? I was dismissed after a hospitalization and am trying to figure out if I can make a case for a review or a waiver. Did you manage to do it? What documents did you provide? Any advice?

If you leave under any circumstances of your own volition you'll be put through the collections process.

The current process will sooner or later start with a letter detailing how much you owe and the procedures for payment, requesting a review (to dismiss the debt as invalid/not your fault) and a waiver (to dispute the morality essentially of the collection should it be judged valid). If you're demonstrably physically/psychologically unable to obtain your funded degree you might have a shot at a winning the review, but I've never seen this circumstance before so I could only speculate.

Maybe this could be avoided by discussing your health issues with the SPO ahead of time and permitted to leave, but that's again a scenario I've never seen before.

But I do feel confident in saying that if you just leave the program with anything other than the SPO's explicit blessing that they won't come after you...they'll come after you for the money sooner or later.

Is it possible to permanently leave the scholarship program without penalty for medical reasons?

Has anyone else faced severe medical problems in this scholarship? How did SMART handle the situation?