To get a sense of how significant the GI Bill was to area colleges, consider Kent State University. With declining enrollment during the depression and the war, emeritus professor and author Bill Hildebrand says the school almost ceased to exist in the early 1940s. But, once veterans started enrolling, Hildebrand says the school population ballooned.
Bill Hildebrand: Classes were tremendously overcrowded. Students sat on the tops of wastebaskets
Hildebrand was a student at Kent State during the peak of the GI Bill boom. And peak it did. In the fall of 1945, the school had about 1,300 students. A year later, it had over 4,000. By the fall of 1949, total enrollment topped 6,000, with about half using the GI Bill benefits. Kent State became so crowded, Hildebrand says the school was frantic. He tells the story of one woman struggling to register the long lines of students for classes.
Bill Hildebrand: She was working away at the desk and she feels a tap on her shoulder. Turns around and there were two GIs, you know, in their flack jackets. They had climbed up the wall, this was on the second floor, they had scaled the wall. So she signed them up! How could she refuse them?
Those former GIs were among the millions of Americans who never thought they'd be registering for classes at a college. Most universities at this point were still elite institutions for the wealthy or brilliant. Before President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill in June of 1944, the University of Chicago's chancellor famously predicted it would open the door to what he called "educational hobos." Instead, the GI Bill gave a chance to Ohio farmboys like Lewis Schupp.
Lewis Schupp: Going out to college was just completely out of the question when I graduated from high school, because we were land rich, and dirt... that's all we had.
When Schupp graduated from high school in 1941, he signed up with the Marines for four years. When he returned, he spent a couple of years working for Cleveland Crane. He says he didn't even know about the GI Bill until he returned from the war. But, he says he always wanted to have a better future. He enrolled at Western Reserve University and studied chemistry... ultimately earning a PhD. Case Western Reserve University historian Dick Baznik says it's not surprising so many veterans turned out to be good students.
Dick Baznik: these were students who could in many cases been admitted to either of these schools before then, but it's not something they thought about. But now the GI Bill was offering them the chance to go to any school in the country basically with
free tuition.
Like at Kent State, enrollments at Case and Western Reserve soared-to more than twice prewar numbers. In 1947, more than 60% of the students at the schools were veterans on the GI Bill.
But, Schupp says, like many veterans in college, it was hard at times to relate to the other students.
Lewis Schupp: They were younger than I was. I felt like their grandfather in some sense because they were so childish.
Many of the veterans were married, lived off campus, and worked part time while they were in school.
The benefits then were generous, though--providing enough money for tuition and expenses. Guenveur Burnell who graduated from Kent State in 1951 remembers feeling a little jealous watching her husband-to-be get free supplies like notebooks and ink from the bill.
Guenveur Burnell: They got 'em three times a year. They just took this voucher to campus supply and that's what they got whether they needed it or not. And I was on scholarship, paying my way through school, and I was like damn, you know, they get this, and I've got to scrape it up to get a lousy notebook once and a while.
Many historians credit the GI Bill as a major contributor to United States prosperity in the 1950s. Some say it helped create the upper middle class in this country, and gave many minority veterans an opportunity for a quality education. All told, more than half of the veterans returning from World War II received education through the program. Today, that percentage is much smaller.