Bob Dole and Bill Clinton had one thing in common during the presidential campaign: Both invoked the GI Bill as a model for LTC their social initiatives.
Dole wanted to give middle-class scholarships to private and parochial schools along the lines of the monumental 1940s legislation. Clinton as recently as his State of the Union address last month called for "a new GI Bill for American workers" in the form of $2,600 grants to the unemployed and underemployed. The grants could be used to pay college tuition.
Earlier, the president had built his AmeriCorps community service program on a nostalgic model of the GI Bill.
It's easy to be nostalgic about the legislation. Signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, it paid the full cost of higher education for millions of soldiers returning to civilian life.
It even provided a monthly stipend of up to $75 in its early years. That was more than he'd earned in the service of his country, remembers Milton Bates, a retired Baltimore businessman who attended Baltimore Junior College (the predecessor of today's Baltimore City Community College) and the University of Maryland School of Law on the GI Bill.
"It was a great deal," says Bates. "I didn't have the what-with to go to college otherwise."
The bill helped transform American life. Higher education became an egalitarian enterprise, open to the many instead of the few. College enrollment more than doubled in a few years. Marriage patterns changed as veterans found their mates in colleges rather than factories. Postwar America became more enlightened because of the GI Bill.
The landscape around colleges and universities also changed, as Quonset-hut "Vetvilles" sprang up in the mud of College Park, Westminster and elsewhere, and as whole towns -- Levittown, N.Y., for example -- resulted from the veterans' rush to higher education.
Taxpayers invested $7 billion in the first round of GI Bill education programs through 1952, but an analysis by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress found that the return in productivity in those seven years could have been as high as $84 billion.
Because it's 53 years old, the GI Bill can be invoked nostalgically by politicians of the '90s, despite the fact that it still lives, now called the Sonny Montgomery GI Bill, after the Mississippi congressman who sponsored its 1995 revision for soldiers returning from the Persian Gulf war. About 5,600 men and women are attending Maryland colleges, universities and proprietary schools under the modern version, which provides nowhere near the full cost of a veteran's college education.
