By the early Fifties, Title II had about run its course. In 1953, World War II veterans constituted only 6.1 percent of enrollments in colleges and universities. It was time to ask what had been wrought. In response, the GIs answered with one voice. "I can say this honestly," Navy veteran Robert Booth recalled many years later, "I'd never have gone to college without it." Most observers echoed these sentiments then, thereafter, and now. In 1965 John Emens, president of Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana, celebrated the GI Bill for giving veterans "an opportunity to find lost paths."
It was, Emens noted, the gift that kept on giving. In 1965 veterans enjoyed an average annual income of $5,100, compared to $3,200 for nonveterans; their unemployment rate was about half that of nonveterans. Furthermore, education begat education. The children of college graduates are far more likely to continue their studies after high school—and the sons and daughters of World War II vets were no exception. "Only God knows what would have become of me if it had not been for the GI Bill," Herbert Edelman of Brooklyn told Ball. Well into the new millennium, the GI Bill had not lost its luster. Title II, proclaimed journalist Edward Humes, made possible the education of fourteen future Nobel laureates, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents of the United States, and hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals. "All would owe their careers" to the bill that "transformed America and rewrote the American Dream."
The bill demolished the contention that the core constituency of higher education was young men and women from affluent families.With the passing of "the Greatest Generation," civic and political participation has declined. The impact of the GI Bill on higher education in the United States was more permanent. By the Fifties, Keith Olson has observed, large colleges, large lecture classes, and the employment of graduate students to teach discussion sections had become the norm. In 1948 only ten universities enrolled more than 20,000 students. Two decades later, fifty-five universities did so—and more than sixty increased the number of degree matriculants past 10,000 for the first time.
Campus life changed as well, though not always in accord with the predictions made in the Forties. The refusal of "GI grinds" to submit to hazing, paddling, and freshman beanies— and their apparent lack of interest in football and frat houses— created expectations that colleges might become "book factories," with fewer extracurricular activities and less school spirit. It did not happen. The image of the student veteran who was contemptuous of extracurricular activities and school rituals is something of a myth. Many GIs enjoyed fraternity beer parties, played golf, and goofed off. In any event, panty raids and "dinky caps" proliferated in the Fifties—and fraternities and football remain defining features of many colleges and universities.
Most important, of course, the bill demolished the contention that the core constituency of higher education was young men and women from affluent families and helped usher in an era of greatly expanded access to America's colleges and universities. Articles on GIs in colleges, historian Daniel Clark has indicated, reveled in stories about average Americans storming ivory towers. By the late Forties, advertisements for consumer products had democratized the image of higher education. More middle-class Americans embraced college as an important—and a reachable— goal. The GI Bill, Clark concludes, helped open "a new route to the American Dream" to a wide segment of the population. "This much has been revealed," Donald Moyer, director of Veterans Education at Cornell, wrote in 1947. "College enrollments will be permanently higher. The so-called GI Bill of Rights has enabled qualified students to come to college who formerly, because of their low economic status, would have been denied the privilege." How higher education faced this challenge, Moyer concluded, "is one of the most significant questions confronting us today."
Here, too, the GI Bill was the catalyst. Not surprisingly, World War II veterans with the highest standard of living as children and those with the highest level of education prior to military service made the greatest use of the college provisions. Age made a difference as well, as younger veterans were more likely to pursue additional education. Nonetheless, socioeconomic status was not all that significant a variable, especially among veterans whose parents had encouraged them to stay in school. One example is Richard Colosimo. Raised in Depression-ravaged Pittsburgh, Colosimo often went to bed hungry. However, his father, who worked part-time in a tailor shop, often told him, "Dick, I don't know how I can ever help you, but get an education—that's the most important thing." After his military discharge, Colosimo entered the American Television Institute, a subcollege training program in Chicago. After a few months, he entered the University of Illinois, only to transfer to the University of Pittsburgh to complete his degree after he got married. The GI Bill provided him—and many other economically disadvantaged veterans—"a way out."
The GI Bill replenished the human capital of the United States, which had been depleted by low college enrollments during the war and hundreds of thousands of combat deaths and disabilities. The number of conferred degrees, which peaked at 496,000 in 1950, was greater than the total in any single year before World War II. It would not be exceeded until the Sixties. This educated workforce helped the nation enter the postindus-trial age. Title II also accelerated, albeit modestly, the expansion in higher education, both as a stimulus for the development of statewide systems of public colleges and universities and as evidence of the achievements of a diverse cohort of students. Its immediate and manifest successes spread the perception that higher education was the preferred path to economic mobility in the United States. For decades the bill served as a rallying point for reformers who were seeking to increase access to college. While Title II may not have been the watershed its most zealous partisans proclaimed, it was critically important, as one critic put it, "not just for what it did but for what so many Americans have lovingly believed it did." Designed as a temporary expedient, it did a good deal for individual GIs and the economy—and in legitimizing the notion that a college degree should be and actually was within reach for millions of Americans.
Glenn Altschuler, PhD '76, is the Litwin Professor of American Studies and dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions. Stuart Blumin is a professor of history emeritus and former director of the Cornell in Washington program. The book,"The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans." © 2009 by Glenn Altschuler & Stuart Blumin, is available directly from the Oxford University Press at www.oup.com/us.