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updated: February 6, 2007
Summary
After World War II, Americans fulfilled their responsibility to
the millions of troops coming home by helping them readjust
to civilian life. In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
signed the “Servicemen’s Readjustment Act,” better known
as the GI Bill, which made higher education affordable for eight
million veterans.
The GI Bill helped reinvent America after a half-decade of
war; a 1988 Congressional study found that every dollar
spent on educational benefits under the original GI Bill
added seven dollars to the national economy in terms of
productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. In his
signing statement, President Roosevelt spoke more simply:
“[The GI Bill] gives emphatic notice to the men and
women in our armed forces that the American people do
not intend to let them down.”
Today, 1.5 million troops are returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan to a very different future than the one FDR
made possible for the Greatest Generation. The current
educational benefits offered to veterans are far lower than
the original GI Bill, covering only 60–70% of the average
cost of four years at a public college or university, or
less than two years at a typical private college. National
Guardsmen and Reservists, “citizen soldiers” who leave
behind civilian lives to serve alongside active-duty troops,
receive even lower education benefits, and are inadequately
protected against job discrimination. And Iraq and
Afghanistan veterans are already swelling the ranks of the
unemployed and the homeless. Nearly 200,000 veterans of
all generations are homeless on any given night.
For more information about the need for education benefits,
please see the IAVA Issue Report: “A New GI Bill: Rewarding our
Troops, Rebuilding our Military.” All IAVA reports are available here.
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