1 gen 1944 anni - GI Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944)

Descrizione:

Popularly known as the GI Bill, 1944 legislation authorizing the government to provide World War II veterans with funds for education, housing, and health care, as well as loans to start businesses and buy homes.

VA:A federal agency that assists former soldiers. Following World War II, the VA helped veterans purchase new homes with no down payment, sparking a building boom that created construction jobs and fueled consumer spending on home appliances and automobiles.

This new ethic of consumption appealed to the expanding postwar middle class, the demographic sector that drove domestic market growth. Middle-class status was more accessible than ever, in part because of federal spending. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, helped send 2.2 million veterans to college and another 5.6 million to trade school via government financing (the bill also provided veterans with health care and housing and loan subsidies). Before the GI Bill, commented one veteran, “I looked upon college education as likely as my owning a Rolls-Royce with a chauffeur.” At one point in the mid 1950s, more than half of all U.S. college students were veterans.

The government financing of education helped make the U.S. workforce the best educated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. American colleges, universities, and trade schools grew rapidly to serve the flood of students — and would expand again when the children of the World War generation, known as baby boomers, reached college age in the 1960s. At Rutgers University, enrollment went from 7,000 before the war to 16,000 in 1947; at the University of Minnesota, from 15,000 to more than 27,000. The GI Bill trained nearly half a million engineers; 200,000 doctors, dentists, and nurses; and 150,000 scientists, among many other professions. More education meant more earning power, which turned into the consumer spending that drove the postwar economy. One observer of the GI Bill was so impressed with its achievements that he declared it responsible for “the most important educational and social transformation in American history.”

The World War II veterans pictured here were purchasing books and supplies at the start of a college semester in 1945. From college and university education to vocational and industrial skill training, the federal government paid for hundreds of thousands of military veterans to receive education in the decade after World War II. As one of the largest social programs ever undertaken by the national government, the GI Bill helped forge a new middle class. College and university enrollments surged in these years, and the American workforce was among the best educated in the world.


The GI Bill stimulated the economy and expanded the middle class in another way: by increasing home ownership. Between the end of World War II and 1966, one of every five single-family homes built in the United States was financed through a GI Bill mortgage — 2.5 million new homes in all. In cities and suburbs across the country, the Veterans Administration (VA) helped former soldiers purchase new homes with no down payment, sparking a building boom that created construction jobs and fueled spending on home appliances and automobiles. Education and home ownership were more than personal triumphs for the families of World War II veterans (and Korean and Vietnam War veterans, eventually). They were financial assets that helped lift more Americans than ever before into a mass-consuming middle class.

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