(Copied from the 6/22/2015 Writer's Almanac)
"On this this day in 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, popularly known as the GI Bill of Rights.
Economists in the '40s were predicting a postwar depression, and politicians were terrified of the idea of 9 million unemployed veterans wandering the country. So they wrote the GI Bill to guarantee unemployment benefits for a year. A congressional committee threw in the idea that veterans should get money to go to college, although even the supporters of the bill didn't think that many GIs would really want to go - but about a million veterans applied for the money within the first year after the war. Professors at the time said the veterans were the most serious students they'd ever seen.
Prior to World War II, only 53,000 Americans held college degrees. By 1947, veterans accounted for half of the nation's college enrollment, which swelled to 500,000 by 1950."
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