It was a pleasure to participate in a piece that reminds the nation what a visionary government can accomplish when it invests in the future of an entire generation. That original GI Bill investment opened up colleges to the middle class, created the middle class, and provided the impetus for transforming a nation of renters into a nation of homeowners. Most people don't understand how opposed the private sector was to such ideas, but the GI Bill -- and the determined veterans who used it after the war -- burst through those barriers, bringing prosperity to the whole nation.
Here's some background on the GI Bill, from Over Here:
It educated fourteen future Nobel Prize winners, three Supreme Court justices, three presidents, a dozen senators, two dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, 238,000 teachers, 91,000 scientists, 67,000 doctors, 450,000 engineers, 240,000 accountants, 17,000 journalists, 22,000 dentists – along with a million lawyers, nurses, businessmen, artists, actors, writers, pilots and others. These are the men and women who used their educations to fight and win the Cold War, take us to the moon, usher in the age of the computer, and build much of what is good in America today.
Prominent beneficiaries of the World War II-era GI Bill include Norman Mailer, Art Buchwald, Elmore Leonard, Frank McCourt, Rod Serling, Arthur Penn, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Bob Dole, George McGovern, George H.W. Bush, Ted Stevens, Sprio Agnew, William Rehnquist, Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and John Paul Stevens - just to name a few.
And for every dollar that was spent educating WW II veterans, that investment returned $7 to the economy. So on top of everything else, it was a bargain for America.
