Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180242
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULES LOH THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
TOUGH ACTS TO FOLLOW
PRESIDENT Clinton's suggested national service program to help pay college tuitions has the potential, he says, to do for this generation what the Land Grant College Act and the GI Bill did for former generations. A tall order.His program seems a simple enough attempt to remedy a national problem: the soaring costs that can put higher education out of reach. The plan would allow college-bound students to invest a year or so of labor in the public interest as sort of working collateral against a college loan.
Back when they were passed, those other two measures seemed simple enough as well.
At the time, few would have predicted that they would come to be ranked as true landmarks of American legislation. By now both have become molded into the education structure, so commonplace that their inclusion is more or less assumed, like the PTA.
The first, the Land Grant College Act, not only put higher learning within reach of the masses, but irreversibly recognized the federal government as a partner in education with the states. The second, the GI Bill, landed squarely on that precedent and shook up higher education more than even its signers could have dreamed. The author and historian James A. Michener, in a recent magazine article, called it one of the two or three finest acts Congress has ever passed.
What the two programs had in common was that they were both optimistic, both costly, and both signed during times of high anxiety over the country's future - in fact, while the country was at war.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill establishing land grant colleges in 1862. It had become evident in the second year of the Civil War that more people were needed who knew how to build bridges, run factories and make the land productive. The aim of the act was to pry higher education from the realm of the privileged and spread it "to those much needing higher instruction for the world's business, for the industrial pursuits and professions of life."
So it did. Land grant colleges - "peoples colleges" as they came to be called - provided the labs that produced the likes of hybrid corn in one era of national need and the digital computer in another.
Four generations later, on June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill. That was barely two weeks after the invasion of Europe and more than a year before the end of World War II.
Its formal name was Public Law 346, the Servicemen's Readjustment Act. It was conceived as a remedy against expected unrest among returning veterans who couldn't find jobs. It provided $500 a year for education plus $50 a month for subsistence ($75 for married couples), as well as low-interest home loans. A few lesser provisions, such as a review of dishonorable discharges, also aimed to stifle potential trouble.
It did not pass without noisy debate.
Opponents saw it as an economically disastrous scheme, "an all-time gravy train" that would suck postwar America into prewar depression. Old allies fell out over its provisions. The American Legion, which practically wrote the bill (and gave it its nickname), lobbied in its favor; other service groups, who thought disabled vets would get short shrift, opposed it.
Many educators, for their part, worried with the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, that "colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles." It was an argument other educators had sounded years before, that land grant colleges would degrade higher education.
But hobo jungles, the campgrounds of Depression drifters, were all too vivid in the memory of many in Congress. So was the bitter bloodshed of the 1932 Bonus Army of jobless World War I veterans. And this time there would be twice as many veterans returning, 15.3 million, after twice as long an absence.
In the end, and in the interest of a nation united in support of its veterans, the vote to pass the GI Bill in both houses of the 78th Congress was unanimous.
The veterans returned to civilian life at the rate of a million a month.
They flocked to schools large and small. Quonset huts and prefab buildings were trucked from closed military bases to 2,600 campuses from coast to coast. They became serviceable classrooms, offices, housing for married students.
In 1947, the peak year, veterans accounted for 49 percent of college enrollment. (At land grant colleges their enrollment was generally higher than the average; 59 percent, for example, at the University of Minnesota.) In 1950 American colleges conferred 496,874 degrees, 162 percent more than in 1939 and a record until the first of the baby boomers began arriving in 1962.
President Clinton did not have to take a poll when he observed that many in his audience probably owed a measure of their success to the GI Bill.
They would include the minority leaders of both houses, along with other high-profile lawmakers and members of the Supreme Court. Former President Bush went to college on the GI Bill.
And so did 2.2 million other Americans of that generation. And an additional 5.6 million went to vocational schools, and many more took on-the-job industrial and agricultural training.
When it expired July 25, 1956, the program had cost $14.5 billion. The college portion cost about 8 percent of the total. About 80 percent went for "readjustment allowances" of $20 a week for up to 52 weeks or until the vet could find work. Critics called it the "52-20 Club," but only one in 10 vets exhausted the benefit; average use was 19 weeks. Most of the rest went for guaranteed housing loans.
Home construction almost had come to a dead stop during the war. As with education, the demand for housing was acute.
In the emergency, President Harry S. Truman released 355,000 temporary housing units and trailers around closed war plants. Vets could have them for the cost of moving them. The president also asked religious leaders to lead a nationwide share-the-housing drive. It was that serious.
The guaranteed loans jolted the peacetime economy into a building boom of more than 5 million new homes. During 1945 alone, home sales to veterans, most of them newlyweds, went from $56 million in June - normally a peak month - to $125 million in December.
Within a decade "Levittowns," named for the originator of tract housing, William J. Levitt, became the generic word for bedroom communities (another new phrase) across the land. They, in turn, became seedbeds for the shopping malls that, at length across the land, hatched an entire suburban culture. Obviously other forces were at work in such a monumental population shift, but sociologists credit the GI Bill with a major role.
Over the years the Veterans Administration has guaranteed more than $360 billion worth of home loans. Last year the total was 266,021 loans, at a value of nearly $23 billion.
Indeed, the bill was a spending forerunner of, so far, $67 billion in versions enacted for veterans and their dependents of the Korean and Vietnam wars and of no wars at all. Today, GI benefits extend as well to members of the Selected Reserve. Veterans' programs now have been a way of life in America for half a century. There has never been a gap.
Nor has the benefit to the nation of a well-educated citizenry been intangible.
Jesse Brown, the secretary of veterans affairs, points to one indicator. It shows that veterans earn more and thus pay more in taxes than nonveterans in every age group. Male veterans between 50 and 64, for example, had median incomes in 1991 of about $5,000 more than nonveterans.
Four years ago, on Sept. 22, 1988, Rep. G.V. Montgomery, D-Miss., the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee whose name attaches to the GI Bill now in force, held a small ceremony in his Capitol office. It commemorated the 20 millionth American eligible for veterans' education assistance.
The honoree was Steven C. Scott, 25, of Canton, Ohio. He had completed a two-year hitch in the Army Signal Corps and enrolled in college.
As it happened, he chose a land grant college, Ohio State University. At least one exists in every U.S. state and territory, 68 colleges in all.
The act establishing land grant colleges was passed the same year free land was offered to homesteaders, awarding 30,000 acres per state for a college. It reflected a restless nation's misgivings about the practical use of all the Latin and moral philosophy - studies the editor Horace Greeley called "intellectualized luxuries" - being taught in America's prestigious colleges, most of them modeled on a European pattern, all of them expensive.
The act's sponsor, Sen. Justin Morrill of Vermont, envisioned more "utile" courses as he called them, studies dealing with animal husbandry, practical chemistry, drainage engineering and "such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts ... [in brief, A&M] without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics . . . [in brief, ROTC]."
Well, agriculture remains a trillion-dollar industry, America's largest, thanks mainly to research and extension programs at land grant colleges. The "other scientific" research that has come out of the likes of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, Purdue, Rutgers and all the other "peoples colleges" would seem to represent ample return for 30,000 acres per state.
Incidentally, the 20 millionth GI Bill beneficiary, Steven Scott, used his $583 monthly benefits at Ohio State to complete his work toward a degree in the utile course of business administration.
Call it poetic fulfillment, true to the original aims of both those monumental milestones of education.