The Educational Repercussions of the “G.I. Bill” in American Society

Abstract

The end of the Second World War was a serious problem of rehabilitation, not only for the country but also for the huge mass of veterans returning home after the military conflict. And in order to avoid the unrest and social tension that followed the First World War, the US administrations led firstly by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and secondly by Harry Truman were commissioned to design a specific plan for rehabilitation and reintegration to civilian life of veterans. The “G.I. Bill”, officially known as the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act" is a law that was passed in June 1944 in the United States, turning into the Public Law 346 with the aim of benefiting the American soldiers who were then still fighting in World War II. The ultimate purpose of this law was to provide demobilized soldiers with a legal mechanism that would allow them to access the finance of professional or university studies together with a pension to help them with their livelihood for a period of one year. This law also gave the soldiers facilities to get loans to buy a home or even to start a business on their own. Throughout this article we will focus our attention on the benefits that this act provided, in particular, to this group of veteran soldiers in the field of education as well as the impact that it had on the expansion of university or professional studies, especially after the return home of Second World War veterans. Therefore, our objective shall be to analyse what repercussions the G.I. Bill had on the educational background of the American veterans after the end of World War II. Even though there does not seem to be a final agreement on the consequences that this law had for soldiers and American society in general, yet it has been recognized from several fields that the approval of this law led to a large number of veterans get a higher education that otherwise would have been near impossible to obtain.