How the GI Bill changed the economy
The new GI Bill gives vets money for tuition, housing and books. But paying for GIs' educations is nothing new. Stephen Smith of American Radioworks explores how the first GI Bill's push to education helped shape the U.S. economy.
Silhouette of a U.S. soldier boarding a military truck on the Pakistani border. (Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images)
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Kai Ryssdal: The government says about 300,000 veterans are expected to go to college this year, with the GI Bill helping to pay at least part of the costs for housing, books, and tuition. While the current version encourages veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to get a college degree, the GI Bill's hardly a new idea. The original dates back to the Second World War and vets who got a higher education for free. And Stephen Smith of American Radioworks reports the first GI Bill not only changed how Americans go to school, it transformed the economy in the process.
STEPHEN SMITH: When World War II ended in 1945, America faced an ominous problem: how to settle its war veterans back into civilian life? In wars dating back to the revolution, American vets got few benefits after the fighting stopped. But in World War II the scale of the problem was huge -- 16 million Americans.
ED Humes: One eighth of the population, one out of eight Americans were serving in some capacity during the war.
Historian Ed Humes.
Humes: You can't have that number of men and women treated shabbily because the country would fall apart. It could never withstand it.
As World War II came to a close many feared a return of the Great Depression, which gripped the nation for more than a decade before the war began. So in 1944, Washington passed a sweeping set of benefits known as the GI Bill of Rights. Vets got unemployment checks, low-interest housing and business loans, and...
Humes: If you applied to a college and you were accepted, the government would pay your tuition. At any school in America, no matter how elite or how expensive it was.
The government was surprised by how many GIs took advantage of the education benefit, nearly eight million veterans in all. Management guru Peter Drucker said that providing free higher education to so many Americans changed the world by creating the modern knowledge economy.
Historian Ed Humes agrees.
HUMES: The scientists and engineers and teachers and thinkers who brought in the information age, who took us to the moon, who waged the cold war, you name it - all those men and women were educated through the GI Bill.
GEORGE SHULTZ: When I came back from two-and-a-half years with the United States Marine Corps in WWII, I decided that I wanted to go on to graduate school.
MIT was the place that Captain George Schultz wanted to study economics.
SHULTZ: Sure enough, I got my tuition paid, and I got a little tiny stipend to go with it.
FILM: The Greatest invasion in all history, a million veterans pouring on to the college campuses of America, from Harvard to Stanford, from State to Old Siwash.
This is a government newsreel from 1947. Before World War II, most Americans didn't have a high school diploma, much less a college degree. After the war, college enrollment exploded.
FILM: An academic crusade. Inspired by the GI Bill of rights. There never was such a mass movement to higher education. It's been called the greatest sociological experiment of all time.
But back in the mid 1940s, no one knew how this sociological experiment would really turn out. Historian Suzanne Mettler says some college officials fretted about whether combat-hardened veterans could fit in among teenage freshmen.
SUZANNE METTLER: People like the president of the University of Chicago and the president of Harvard worried that this was going to make institutions of higher learning into "hobo jungles" as they put it. To bring in the riff raff.
Turns out the GI's had an altogether different effect on the once clubby bastions of college life, 25-year old guys who'd stormed beaches in combat gear had no time for freshman beanies or raccoon coats. They were on a mission.
FILM: Some are working with grim concentration towards a degree or a job. They are defter, quicker because of wartime skills. They know how to tackle a job and get it done.
SHULTZ: We were there strictly to learn something. And we were demanding.
Again, WWII veteran George Schultz.
SHULTZ: I think it helped to raise the standards all across America. And now we have, without any question, the best system of higher education in the world.
Historians say the GI Bill fueled a major expansion of the nation's higher education system and made college a cornerstone of middle-class American life. Marine Captain George Schultz did pretty well with his GI Bill education. He taught at MIT and Chicago, he ran a big construction company. And George Schultz served as U.S. Secretary of State.
Historian Ed Humes says the free education that so many veterans got under the GI Bill helped make the "greatest generation" so great.
HUMES: The GI Bill provided the education for 14 Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners.
And even though it's a bit of a trite saying, this list really does go on and on and on.
This is Stephen Smith for Marketplace.
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From State College, PA, 11/09/2009
Researchers indicate that the WWII GI Bill of Rights has paid over 8 times its cost in additional revenues to the government through increased payroll taxes, etc.
I learned this while taking classes fora doctorate in adult education after finishing my BS using my own GI Bill benefits. I will contribute back in higher payroll taxes too (I hope.)
From San Antonio, FL, 10/07/2009
As a baby boomer, I can see the enormous benefits my generation has enjoyed thanks first to the sacrifice of my parents' generation in the war effort and then to President Roosevelt and those brave Democrat legislators who made the GI Bill happen which made America strong which invented the middle class which gave so many of us such a high standard of living. That is the America of Hope and it lives despite the cynics who would undermine those values and which will make us strong once again. We don't have to be greatest but we still have the potential to be very good if we want to be.
From New Haven, CT, 10/07/2009
The GI Bill was a real life saver while in my first teaching position, having two toddlers, no summer salary and writing a dissertation!
10/07/2009
I can't imagine where we would be were it not for this catalyst.
Talk about a civilization leap forward.
From Jacksonville, FL, 10/07/2009
I qualified for 48 months of GI bill (WWII + Korea). The GI bill enabled me to return to school and become a doctor. The 48 months was not long enough but certainly made it possible.
From Alexandria, VA, 10/07/2009
Great piece on the GI Bill. You left out that it almost didn't happen. Passed the House by one vote, and he was brought in from his sick bed in Georgia. Legislators considered it radical socialism and too expensive. Said it would never work. Even FDR was hesitant. Wait ... part of this sounds oddly familiar.
From Dayton, OH, 10/06/2009
Having served 4 years in the USAF in Europe at the end of the Vietnam War (one of very few women), I benefited from the same GI Bill as that of the Greatest Generation. I am heartbroken to now see that our son (an Army Natl Guard soldier), who has served one 15-mth tour in Iraq and will soon serve another one, is not receiving the same benefits. Our GI Bill paid for any college, a full 4 years, and we were also given a small stipend to live on (and they paid for our books). The 'new' GI Bill is much less in dollars and cents, and it is a matching program. Also, when the military members are constantly deployed and then stop-lossed again and again, they are never able to get on with their lives. Our military members today are treating like slaves. It truly is downright shameful.
From Oxnard, CA, 10/06/2009
As the mother of a daughter who served seven years in the U.S. Navy and is now completing her college education with the benefit of the GI Bill I would like to comment on this interesting story. As the story said, it was called the GI Bill of Rights, not a "free education". The college benefits service members receive is one of the benefits service members receive as part of the compensation they have earned in exchange for giving years of their lives in military service to our country. The benefit is not free at all. I am proud of my daughter for serving our country and I am also proud she will soon be graduating college, something she has worked hard to accomplish, nothing free about it.
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