Our soldiers pay the ultimate price: Can't we just give them a little reward?
Because It’s Right
It's hard to serve your country in Baghdad or Kabul. It shouldn't be hard to pay for college once you've come back home.
Anna Quindlen, NEWSWEEK
James Webb, the Vietnam Vet and senator from Virginia who was once secretary of the Navy, likes to share the chart he prepared for five of his Senate colleagues. They are men who fought in World War II and afterward went to college and even law school on the American taxpayer, a free ride in exchange for their service. Webb's chart quantifies how much of their education costs would have been covered if they had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Not even close.
In 1944 President Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI Bill. It was one of the most visionary and transformative pieces of legislation in American history, providing free education for returning veterans. Its champions believed it was the moral response to the sacrifice those service members had made, but it also solved an economic and social problem. An influx of millions of unemployed and untrained men into the labor force could have triggered another Great Depression. But with 5 million of those soldiers becoming students instead, the result was the ascendancy of the middle class and a period of enormous prosperity. Every dollar spent on the GI Bill was multiplied many times over in benefits to the postwar U.S. economy.
But government institutions are notoriously amnesiac. College costs have escalated, and benefits have shrunk. Service members are surprised to discover that the grateful nation that made it possible for Sen. John Warner to go to both college and law school and Sen. Frank Lautenberg to graduate from an Ivy League university won't even cover three years at a public institution, much less a private college. Members of the National Guard and Reserves, who have been a linchpin of the current conflicts, receive only a fraction of that help.
(The rest is here.)
It's hard to serve your country in Baghdad or Kabul. It shouldn't be hard to pay for college once you've come back home.
Anna Quindlen, NEWSWEEK
James Webb, the Vietnam Vet and senator from Virginia who was once secretary of the Navy, likes to share the chart he prepared for five of his Senate colleagues. They are men who fought in World War II and afterward went to college and even law school on the American taxpayer, a free ride in exchange for their service. Webb's chart quantifies how much of their education costs would have been covered if they had served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Not even close.
In 1944 President Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI Bill. It was one of the most visionary and transformative pieces of legislation in American history, providing free education for returning veterans. Its champions believed it was the moral response to the sacrifice those service members had made, but it also solved an economic and social problem. An influx of millions of unemployed and untrained men into the labor force could have triggered another Great Depression. But with 5 million of those soldiers becoming students instead, the result was the ascendancy of the middle class and a period of enormous prosperity. Every dollar spent on the GI Bill was multiplied many times over in benefits to the postwar U.S. economy.
But government institutions are notoriously amnesiac. College costs have escalated, and benefits have shrunk. Service members are surprised to discover that the grateful nation that made it possible for Sen. John Warner to go to both college and law school and Sen. Frank Lautenberg to graduate from an Ivy League university won't even cover three years at a public institution, much less a private college. Members of the National Guard and Reserves, who have been a linchpin of the current conflicts, receive only a fraction of that help.
(The rest is here.)
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