G.I. Bill

The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (commonly known as "the GI Bill") was an act of the US Congress to provide benefits to Americans returning to civilian life after military service.

Benefits included helping to pay for returning veterans to finish their schooling, or enroll in new studies at colleges and universities, and helped veterans to acquire home mortgages.

In an article reviewing the impact of the Bill, fifty years after its passage, the New York Times wrote:

The bill, formally titled the American Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, is credited with elevating a generation of working-class veterans to the middle class. It opened higher education to the masses, fueled a housing boom and turned renters into homeowners through low-interest, no-money-down mortgages."

However, even though the bill had undergone multiple updates, benefits had been eroded by inflation. Young veterans, returning to civilian life after service in World War 2, were generally able to live on their GI Bill benefits, while they studied, but, by 1994, those benefits were only a modest contributions to a returning veterans education costs.