Here is a short section on the GI bill from my new book, The Confiscation of American Prosperity
_The Lesson of the GI Bill_ Perhaps the greatest example of educational outreach came from the GI Bill. With the exception of a few schools, such as the City University of New York, the university environment was usually foreign to working‑class children. Despite the expansion of both the state universities and the more widespread availability of technical training in higher education, prior to World War II, colleges and universities were still largely finishing schools for the children of the elite. The end of World War II ignited fears that the economy was likely to sink back into a depression without the stimulus of military spending. Political leaders also wanted to prevent a repeat of a confrontation, such as the Bonus March, a Washington gathering of poor, World War I veterans only a little more than a decade before, in 1932, which General Douglas MacArthur violently routed. To accommodate the returning soldiers, Congress passed the GI Bill, which funded university education for about one‑half of the surviving veterans following World War II. This program dramatically broke with the elite academic traditions and triggered one of the most massive transformations of social capabilities in the history of the United States (Skocpol 1998, p. 96). Not everybody applauded this policy at the time. Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago dreaded the prospect of swarms of veterans entering into the hallowed halls of academia. Hutchins was hardly a rabid conservative. In fact, he had a well‑deserved reputation as a liberal and in many respects was one of the great visionaries of higher education. Hutchins warned that "colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles" (Hutchins 1944; cited in Olson 1974, p. 33). In short, the GI Bill threatened the class structure of higher education. More than a half century after the GI Bill began, Robert M. Berdahl, Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, lent some credence to Hutchins' instinctual reaction: The GI Bill, I believe, came closer to being a social revolution than any event in American history in the twentieth century. It democratized universities by providing access to vast numbers of young men who would never otherwise have received an education. Equally important, it opened the doors of elite private universities to a much broader spectrum of the population. It produced an educated workforce that revitalized the American economy. Universities expanded in size and importance. [Berdahl 2000] Although Hutchins seemed to be mostly concerned about maintaining the universities as elite institutions, some of his apprehensions seemed well‑grounded at the time. Certainly, many of the returning veterans were not born into the aristocratic strata of the population that typically populated the elite colleges and universities, such as Hutchins' own University of Chicago. Besides, a good number of these veterans had just finished participating in a violent conflict. That experience would not seem to be appropriate training for aspiring college students. Hutchins may even have realized that many of the veterans would be suffering from what we now call post‑traumatic stress disorder, perhaps threatening the tranquility of the cloistered environment of a major university. Most important, perhaps, Hutchins dreaded the prospect of colleges and universities turning into vocational schools (Olson 1974, pp. 33‑34). In the end, all but the last of Hutchins' fears proved to be unfounded. The veterans by and large were far more serious about their studies than the typical well‑bred, young college student. Judging from what I observed as a teacher during the Vietnam era, these enthusiastic veterans probably pushed many of the younger students to excel far more than they otherwise would have done, expanding the benefits of the GI Bill well beyond the ranks of the returning veterans. After graduation, many of these veterans rose to positions that would have seemed unimaginable before the war. We get a feel for the profound importance of the GI Bill for lower‑class citizens from an account of a reunion of the 1944 high school class from Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, a poor, working‑class community. The author, Edwin Kiester, Jr., himself a beneficiary of the GI Bill, wrote that his class had 103 male graduates in a high school class of 270. Kiester reported with some evident pride that: ... thirty earned college degrees, nearly ten times as many as had in the past; 28 of the 30 attended college under the GI Bill of Rights. The class produced ten engineers, a psychologist, a microbiologist, an entomologist, two physicists, a teacher‑principal, three professors, a social worker, a pharmacist, several entrepreneurs, a stockbroker, and a journalist [Kiester himself]. The next year's class matched the 30‑percent college attendance almost exactly. The 110 male graduates of 1945 included a federal appellate judge and three lawyers, another stockbroker, a personnel counselor, and another wave of teachers and engineers. For almost all of them, their college diploma was a family first. Some of their parents had not completed elementary school ‑‑ a few could not read or write English. [Kiester 1994, p. 132] The experience of the Turtle Creek students was replicated throughout the country. As Kiester noted: the first GI Bill turned out 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 22,000 dentists, 17,000 writers and editors, and thousands of other professionals. Colleges that had languished during the Depression swiftly doubled and tripled in enrollment. More students signed up for engineering at the University of Pittsburgh in 1948 (70 percent of them veterans) than had in five years combined during the 1930s. By 1960 there were a thousand GI Bill‑educated vets listed in Who's Who. [Kiester 1994, p. 130] As the universities grew to absorb the returning soldiers, they created an infrastructure of buildings and faculty capable of handling a far larger population of students than ever before. To utilize these infrastructures after the wave of veterans had graduated, colleges and universities maintained higher enrollments. In this way, the GI Bill represented the great step forward in the democratization of higher education and society, paying huge dividends for many decades. Nobody, to my knowledge, certainly no economist, has ever tried to take account of the full impact of the GI Bill, either for people such as Kiester's classmates or for the nation as a whole. Such a work would be daunting, to say the least, because the ramifications of this transformation are so extensive. Of course, the impact of the GI Bill goes far beyond the terrain that economists typically navigate. Thomas Lemieux, a Canadian economist, and David Card, a fellow Canadian who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and a recipient of the John Bates Clark award from the American Economic Association, studied the Canadian version of the GI Bill, although from a relatively narrow perspective. The Canadian law did not affect Quebec as much as the rest of Canada because the French‑speaking universities made no provision for returning veterans. By comparing labor productivity in Quebec and Ontario, they were able to get an estimate of the effect of the Canadian version GI Bill on labor productivity. As would be expected, they found that productivity rose considerably faster in Ontario than Quebec. This measure certainly understates the effect of the Canadian GI Bill, in part because their methodology assumes that the improvements in Ontario would not affect Quebec. Certainly, some of the productivity improvements in Ontario would have filtered into Quebec, either because workers moved from one province to another or because of the spread of technology developed in Ontario. The GI Bill and the nature of the postwar economy reinforced each other. During the Golden Age, the economy was growing rapidly enough to offer opportunities to the new graduates. In addition, the Great Depression and the war loosened the grip of the old hierarchies making room for these new college graduates to apply their skills. One other educational factor contributed to the success of the postwar US economy: Nazi stupidity. Prior to 1939, the United States lagged far behind Germany in science. For example, Germany had earned five times as many Nobel prizes in chemistry than the United States. By driving many of his best scientists out of the country, Germany decimated its scientific heritage. The United States had the opportunity to welcome a good number of these scientists. Albert Einstein was the most famous of these émigrés, but he was one of many. The arrival of these scientists was an important factor both in winning World War II and in catapulting the United States into the front ranks of science (see Rosenberg 2000). This infusion of science from the combination of the European refugees and the GI bill came just in time. Although the effect of high wages and native ingenuity kept US technology at a high level, postwar technology was much more dependent on scientific expertise than had been the case earlier. The GI Bill was a magnificent achievement, perhaps the greatest economic policy success in US history. It helped to keep inequality in check, while it stimulated economic growth. A new GI Bill or better yet universal access to education would allow many people to come closer to realizing their potential, even though educational reform would not directly aid in overcoming the stifling, hierarchical relationships that define most jobs. A massive investment in public education could have an even greater impact, providing that social and cultural barriers to class mobility be dismantled. Every educator knows that the education can be most effective when it touches students at a younger age. Shortchanging education, regardless of the reason, deprives society of the potential creativity of the students numbed, humiliated, or even antagonized by the educational system. The full extent of these costs is unmeasurable. Ideally, the educational system would not have to contend with the complications that poverty creates for its students. But the reality is that one of every six children in the United States lives in poverty. For many of these children, violence and degradation is a common experience. Nobody can expect an educational system ‑‑ especially one that is denied adequate resources ‑‑ to undo all the damage that the rest of society does to its children. However, in the midst of oppressive poverty, the educational system should make special efforts to reach out to children in disadvantaged circumstances to help them tap their potential. An equivalent of a GI bill for poor children could inspire some young people, who might otherwise fall into criminal activity, to follow a different path. Ignoring the payoff that society would reap from nurturing their talents, the benefits from crime reduction alone would be substantial. For example, one recent study estimated the effect on the crime rate of an increase in overall male high school graduation rates in 1990 ‑‑ not just the rates for poor children, but for all children. This work seems especially credible since the authors used several different measures to confirm their findings. Each approach yielded similar estimates. They calculated that a small increase of just one percent in graduation rates would have resulted in "nearly 400 fewer murders and 8,000 fewer assaults would have taken place .... In total, nearly 100,000 fewer crimes would take place" (Lochner and Moretti 2004, p. 182). The estimated economic saving from increased graduation was $1.4 billion. Targeting the graduation rates for poor children would have an even more dramatic impact. Unfortunately, the No Child Left Behind Act actually gives educators an incentive to lower graduation rates. Administrators know that the tactic of removing difficult children from their schools leaves them school with a larger share of high performers.
