Government policy also played a role in smoothing the transition of servicemen into the workforce. The so-called GI Bill of Rights provided returning servicemen a number of benefits, including financial aid for veterans returning to school. This legislation delayed the reentry of many former servicemen into the labor force and provided them with improved skills.
Planning for veterans started in a serious way when President Roosevelt appointed the Postwar Manpower Committee, which issued a report in June 1943 recommending a generous package of benefits for veterans. Pushed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, Congress was also inclined to be generous for a number of reasons beyond the simple gratitude that Americans felt toward the people who had sacrificed to defend them. There was a general perception that demobilization had gone badly after World War I and that veterans had not been treated well. There were also the examples of generous veterans’ packages emphasizing education that had been provided by Wisconsin after World War I. Finally, there was the fear that the depression would return after the war and that, without an adequate package of veterans benefits, returning military
Personnel would go straight from “the battle lines to the bread lines.” The resulting legislation, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1943, has generally been known since by its popular name: the GI Bill of Rights. The GI Bill provided a wide range of benefits, including mustering-out pay; health care; assistance with job placement; low-interest loans to buy a home, farm, or business; unemployment benefits; reemployment rights; employment preferences; and education benefits.
The GI Bill’s education provisions have been considered the most revolutionary parts of the legislation. Among other education benefits, the GI Bill provided money for tuition, fees, and living expenses for veterans enrolling in colleges and universities. Partly as a result of the GI Bill, enrollment in higher education boomed after the war. The peak year in terms of the influence of the original GI Bill was 1947, when about 1.7 million veterans were enrolled in college, making up 71 percent of the student body. (The Vietnam Era peak in 1977 was about 2 million.) The GI Bill cannot be given all the credit for increasing the percentage of young Americans attending colleges and universities in the postwar period. Enrollment continued to grow, and the percentage of young people attending colleges and universities continued to rise, long after the veterans of World War II had moved on. The emphasis on higher education was a natural outgrowth of the high school movement that had occurred earlier in the century and the increasing demand from the private sector for highly skilled workers. The GI Bill, however, did play a role in jump-starting the postwar expansion of higher education. It demonstrated that Americans from all sorts of backgrounds could succeed on the college campus. It also transformed many colleges and universities. Rutgers, now the State University of New Jersey, for example, had to hire professors and learn to “mass-produce” education, to accommodate the veterans.
World History
