A critical look at the GI Bill’s impact

September 10, 2009|Chuck Leddy

The authors, professors at Cornell University, reexamine one of the most popular government programs of the 20th century, the GI Bill. As the authors make clear in their detailed analysis of its legislative history and its major impact on the postwar generation, the GI Bill was an important tool in creating postwar prosperity, enabling millions of veterans to attend college, finish vocational training, obtain VA loans for homes and businesses, and receive unemployment payments.

With World War II ending, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was concerned about the potentially damaging economic impact of 15.7 million veterans returning home, looking for scarce jobs and scarcer housing. The GI Bill was intended to ease the re-integration of these veterans into civilian life, at first by offering them regular readjustment payments until they could find a job. Anti-New Deal conservatives like Mississippi Congressman John Rankin worried that these payments might create a freeloader mentality for veterans. But as Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin show, only about half of returning veterans received even a single unemployment payment.

By far the most famous benefits of the program were financial assistance for education and housing. “A whopping 51 percent of GIs took advantage of this [educational] provision,’’ the authors write, “[a]ltogether 2.2 million attended college . . . and 5.6 million opted for’’ vocational training. The authors explore in detail exactly how this influx of veterans overloaded, and forever changed, America’s higher education system. Despite serious shortages of student housing and faculty, US colleges expanded to meet the increased demand. The veterans, the authors explain, “earned higher grades than their civilian counterparts.’’ The GI Bill’s impact wasn’t positive across the board. With so many male veterans demanding college spots, civilian female applicants were disproportionately excluded. Nor did the program ensure that African-American veterans would gain equal access to higher education.

The authors make it clear that the education benefits of the legislation helped spur postwar economic growth by training legions of professionals. The GI Bill, they write, “made possible the education of fourteen future Nobel laureates, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, [and] three presidents of the United States.’’ It also greatly increased access to higher education for ethnic and religious minorities who had been previously excluded. Yet discrimination would continue despite the GI Bill.