The G. I. Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges

The book examines a significant chapter in the history of higher education and in the twentieth-century history of the US. In his study of the origins and influence of the World War II legislation that sent more than two million veterans to college, Mr. Olson concludes that the dominant motive of the originators was anxiety about the economy. The primary object of the Act was to minimize veteran unemployment and prevent the discontent that legislators feared might arise from it. The public and the veterans, on the other hand, viewed the G.I. Bill as a new form of the traditional veterans' bonus. In 1944 and 1945, few people recognized the potential of the legislation, and most educators expected substandard work from the veterans. The veterans were to astonish the faculties and administrations of more than two thousand institutions by their numbers, their maturity, and their academic achievements, and the G.I. college program was to become the most widely admired and least criticized federal program of the postwar era. Its success helped enact the Korean and the Vietnamese G.I. Bills, made the married student and accepted part of academic life, and help to lay a foundation for the bigness that has characterized higher education in the sixties and seventies.