This year of special remembrance and celebration of World War II holds special meaning for higher education -- it is also the 60th anniversary of the passage of the GI Bill. Its passage in June 1944 was largely unheralded (the Normandy invasion was in full swing), and its consequences totally unforeseen. Nevertheless, the bill almost instantly changed the social landscape of America.
Contemporary political leaders periodically call for a new GI Bill, using the name as a synonym for some vague general aid to education and to convey a concept of universal access to higher education. That was the effect but not the intent of the GI Bill. It was conceived as a partial solution to potential postwar chaos and as a reward for military service. The latter purpose has lived on in subsequent, though less generous, versions for Korean War and Vietnam War veterans and now as an enlistment incentive for all volunteer military personnel under the Montgomery GI Bill.
Nor was its passage through Congress unmarked by controversy. Many leading academics of the time expressed concern that the GI Bill was a threat to academic quality, and they sought to control and circumscribe eligibility. While most of those academics eventually acknowledged the high quality and motivation of veteran students, the immediate impact of older and middle- and lower-class students’ enrolling at colleges and universities altered prewar perceptions of higher education, giving rise to today’s continuing issues of mission, access, diversity, and financing.
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, brilliantly labeled the GI Bill of Rights, was a response to the prospective return to civilian life of more than 15 million servicemen and about 350,000 women. Four years of World War II, preceded by 11 years of the Great Depression, left the nation, especially those in the veterans’ age group, largely uneducated, lacking in work experience, and living in substandard and overcrowded dwellings. At the war’s end, the nation faced a massive demobilization of both the military and the domestic wartime economy, with attendant dislocation of human and social capital. Political leaders genuinely feared the chaotic and revolutionary conditions that characterized the decades of the 1920s and 1930s after World War I. It is out of that history that the GI Bill was born. The disastrous prewar conditions, the war’s brutality, and postwar fears are often forgotten or cloaked by the glamorous myth of World War II as “the last great war” and its veterans as “the greatest generation.”
The GI Bill provided three extraordinary benefits. The only requirements were military service for at least 90 days and an honorable discharge. No means test, no tax credits, and minimal red tape were required to receive an unemployment allowance of $20 per week for up to 52 weeks (the so-called 52-20 Club); loan guarantees for the purchase of a home, a farm, or a business; and educational opportunities -- collegiate, vocational, or on-the-job apprenticeships -- with tuition, fees, and books paid for, and supporting stipends for living expenses provided, for up to 48 months depending upon length of service.
The 52-20 Club, feared by some to be a boondoggle, was used by less than 57 percent of the 16 million eligible, in most cases for just a few weeks, resulting in an expenditure of only 20 percent of the projected total costs (kudos for the greatest generation for not taking advantage of a free year on what was at that time a lot of money).
The postwar housing crisis was severe, a result of 15 years of depression, war, neglect, and shortages of supplies. The housing crisis was not met by construction of government housing projects. Instead, a guaranteed-loan program stimulated massive building and purchase of homes, farms, and small businesses. That initiated an amazing change in the American physical and social landscape and stimulated demand for every conceivable consumer good, including education and training. Suburbs grew overnight along with roads, schools, churches, and shopping centers.
Under the education provisions, 2.2 million veterans attended two- and four-year colleges and universities. Even more veterans -- 3.5 million -- used opportunities at vocational schools. An additional 1.5 million were involved in on-the-job training, and about 700,000 used their benefits for farm training. Veterans chose any school or training program to which they could gain admission.
The Veterans Administration (now the Veterans Affairs Department) administered the education program, not the U.S. Office of Education, the education bureaucracies in the states, or the universities and colleges themselves. The higher-education associations sought to have the funds sent to and administered through the colleges, but Congress, to the consternation of the education establishment, deliberately chose the VA, which certified eligibility, paid the bills to the college, and mailed a stipend to the veteran. That was it.
The GI Bill is mainly identified with higher education and with images of a new American campus life. Before World War II, most colleges were characteristically rural, private, small, elitist, white, and Protestant, and married students were generally excluded. Public institutions were not too dissimilar. In 1940, about 1.5 million students were enrolled at all colleges and universities, and less than 200,000 earned college degrees. In 1950, about 2.7 million enrollments resulted in nearly 500,000 college degrees awarded by both private and public institutions to students of varied religions and races, most in their mid- to late 20s. About half of the veteran students were married, and 25 percent had children.
In 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of enrollments, nearly half of whom had enrolled at just 38 colleges and universities, including the notable private institutions. College life was marked by extraordinary crowding of classrooms and living space, and the accomplishment of campus leaders in meeting the crisis is noteworthy. Indiana University, for example, ballooned from about 3,000 students in 1944 to over 10,000 in 1946, and its campus “had the general appearance of a vast shipyard in full operation,” according to Thomas D. Clark, the author of a history of the university.
It is estimated that of the 2.2 million who went to college, about 1.75 million would have attended anyway, based on prewar data. Hence fewer than 500,000 who would otherwise not have gone accepted the opportunity.
To some these numbers may appear small, but before WWII, most people had not gone beyond elementary or secondary school; a high-school diploma was a rare achievement, earned by less than 25 percent of the population. Almost all forecasts logically pointed to the likelihood of a very modest enrollment response. After all, higher education was not only limited and elitist, it was notoriously discriminatory with respect to race, sex, and religion. Before WWII only one adult in 16 had a college education. Frank T. Hines, the first VA administrator, calculated that about 700,000 veterans would attend college by the time eligibility under the law expired in 1956.
Irrespective of the number of veteran students who took advantage of it, the GI Bill has influenced higher education to this day in often unexpected ways. For example, one can assume that the initial wave of GI’s on campuses presumed that they would acquire the education previously available to the elite. Once exposed to the classroom, older, experienced, impatient veteran students pressed for more practical applications of their learning and preparation for work. That was accompanied by a decline of the liberal arts in favor of occupational and technical education, especially in engineering and business. Upward mobility, rather than certification of the upper classes, marked American higher education thereafter.
Consider, too, the baby-boom generation, the progeny of WWII veterans (about 600,000 more babies were born in 1946 than in 1945), who became the college students of the notorious ‘60s and ‘70s. Campus enrollments soared and along with them a need for huge public investment in the development and expansion of colleges and universities as well as community colleges.
Today more than 16 million people are enrolled in higher education, more than a third of whom are in community colleges. About 1.1 million earn bachelor’s degrees each year, and an equal number earn associate, graduate, and professional degrees. By the early 1980s, one in five Americans had a college education, a proportion that has remained virtually unchanged.
It is appropriate to ascribe this growth to the major legacy of the GI Bill: the opening of the academy to all classes of people and turning what had been a limited privilege to a generalized public expectation. If there is a negative side to the story, it may simply be that, prompted by the GI Bill, higher education became a hot commodity without much agreement on just what the commodity was and covering almost any form of postsecondary education or training.
It is mistakenly presumed that the GI Bill gave instant rise to the movement of what became known as adult education, lifelong learning, and similar terms including the unfortunate “nontraditional student.” We made the extraordinary discovery that “older” people (presumably over 25) could learn. But the fact is that several years passed after the WWII GI’s left and adults returned to school. The lapse is undoubtedly due to the excellent availability of jobs in the expanding postwar economy, homeownership spurred by the veterans’ home loans, the high birthrate of the 1950s, and strong cultural support for family life in suburbia that marked the postwar period.
Currently, almost 40 percent of higher-education enrollment comprises students over 25, many in graduate programs, many in community colleges or in continuing-education or part-time programs. That the return of older students is still treated as somewhat strange, “nontraditional,” and a special burden, separate from traditional full-time undergraduates, shows some disconnect with the supposed lesson of the GI Bill. As a matter of public policy, there is little encouragement for adult students in the way of financial aid or other considerations.
Among the more socially significant revolutions wrought by the GI Bill was the impact upon discriminatory practices. Blacks and Jews in particular were able to use the GI Bill to break barriers to their participation in higher education. Historically black institutions experienced sharp increases in enrollments and were granted federal funds for expansion of campus construction. Black veterans in Northern urban areas attended formerly all-white institutions. The development of a black middle class is a highlight of that generation.
Nevertheless the opportunities afforded blacks were not equal. It is important to recall that the military was racially segregated until 1948 and that Brown v. Board of Education was still years away, as was integration of Southern colleges. In addition, the postwar housing boom was carried out under policies of racial segregation and discrimination, North and South. We are left now to lament our failure to use the GI Bill more effectively on behalf of African-American veterans, and the continuing disappointing history of black enrollment in colleges and universities.
Jewish veterans gained entry into elite colleges then known as bastions of anti-Semitism and benefited from the growth of public institutions in urban areas. The GI Bill moved the children of European immigrants, including Catholics, into academe, business, and the professions, and essentially eliminated religious bigotry in American higher education.
Women were nearly invisible during those halcyon postwar years. The progress made by women who entered the work force as well as the military during the war was interrupted during the postwar years. Less than 3 percent of veterans (about 64,000) who attended college under the GI Bill were women. Preferences for male veterans in education, coupled with the crisis in classroom and residential space, negatively affected women’s enrollment in most schools. Many women’s colleges enrolled men for the first time.
With the enormous birth rate and the development of homeownership and new communities, it was presumed that women would and should return to home care and child rearing, which many of that generation did. When their children grew, many did return to college, but it was their daughters who formed the base of the women’s-liberation movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Today women dominate the college scene and are prominent in major professional schools. The present status of women in higher education can be traced to the GI Bill by linking the higher-education success of the fathers and grandfathers to that of contemporary young women.
The decision by Congress to finance the GI Bill through the students themselves rather than through government bureaucracies or higher-education institutions was a crucial and lasting one. It was a centralized entitlement-and-voucher program that was based on a decentralized market approach, irrespective of financial need or previous educational status. It preserved the idea of avoiding federal control over education and established the basic method for subsequent, although less generous, veterans’ education benefits and for federal loans and grants to college students. There is now serious thought being given (and enacted in Colorado) to direct financing by states of individual college students rather than through institutions and letting the marketplace determine the purposes for which the funds are spent. Numerous state and federal programs, such as AmeriCorps, use GI Bill-like incentives to encourage public-service activities or careers in teaching or medicine for the price of college tuition benefits or student-loan forgiveness.
Those of us who are WWII veterans were privileged to be afforded an extraordinarily generous opportunity to get an education, develop a career, enrich our lives, and contribute to society. In contemporary terms, the GI Bill may appear to have been a huge welfare program, but it would be wrong to treat it as such. It was a special law for a very special time, made available only to veterans and unrelated to need. The government provided the incentive and made the money available, but the individual decided not only how and where to use it but whether to use it at all.
Nevertheless, the major legacy of the GI Bill is the idea that, given the opportunity, any person can undertake higher education for both personal and societal benefit. Links to the GI Bill of Rights can be found in the numerous national and state programs that encourage access to higher education with grants, scholarships, and loans. The issue now is not whether we should support that legacy but rather for whom and at what cost it should be provided. Absent now, happily, are the desperate social conditions that evolved from the Great Depression and WWII. But the real differences now lie in the vast competition for available public funds and the lost shared sense of great national purpose which marked post-World War II America.
Milton Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president. He is the author of The GI Bill: The Law That Changed America (Lickle Publishing Inc., 1997), a companion book to a PBS television production.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 41, Page B9
