The Impact of the GI Bill on Legal Education
by brandon bigelow
Part I. The Original GI Bill and the Impact of Returning Veterans on Legal Education
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt first urged Congress in 1943 to provide educational benefits for veterans returning from World War II, he had far more pragmatic reasons for the suggestion than the “special and continuing obligation to these men and women in the armed services” to which he adverted. Only eleven years had passed since the “Bonus Army” of 20,000 unemployed World War I veterans marched on Washington D.C. to demand early payment of a cash bonus promised by the federal government. The march precipitated a crisis compelling President Herbert Hoover to call out the Army — under the command of General Douglas MacArthur and including two young majors named Eisenhower and Marshall — to bring peace to the nation’s capital. As to World War II veterans, Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York warned that if veterans “come home and sell apples as they did after the last war ... I believe we would have chaotic and revolutionary conditions in America.”
In November 1942, as casualties mounted in the bloody fight on Guadalcanal in the Pacific and the Allies scored their first tentative victories in North Africa, the need for more conscripts became painfully clear. Signing into law an amendment to the Selective Service Act that expanded the draft to eighteen and nineteen year olds, President Roosevelt promised parents that these young men would be able to resume their education when they returned from war. He commissioned a study by a committee of educators and military officers “for the taking of steps to enable young men whose education has been interrupted to resume their schooling ... after their service in the armed forces has come to an end.” The Armed Forces Committee on Post-War Educational Opportunities for Service Personnel — called the “Osborn Committee” after its director, Brigadier General Frederick H. Osborn — included among its members Young B. Smith, the dean of Columbia University Law School.
The Osborn Committee, perceiving that the problem of returning troops was already upon the country and that any effective program would require tremendous lead time and coordination, wasted no time in tackling the question. In July 1943, less than nine months after first meeting and with Allied troops making their first successful landings in Italy, the committee submitted a preliminary report to President Roosevelt. In that report, the Osborn Committee recommended that the federal government provide each man and woman who had served six months or more during the war one year of education or training, along with a living allowance to encourage veterans to take advantage of educational opportunities. Further, the committee recommended that a limited number of exceptional veterans be permitted to pursue up to three more years of education.
Although the committee focused upon the problem presented by the president, “the aggregate educational shortages which are being created by the war,” the committee was keenly aware that a comprehensive plan would be required to cushion the blow to the domestic economy as a projected 12,000,000 veterans demobilized at the end of the war. The committee reminded the president that the cost of maintaining a veteran at an educational institution would be far less than that of maintaining that same person on active duty. While nobody could be certain how many veterans would take advantage of these opportunities, the committee thought that a minimum of 1,000,000 men and women would apply for the first year benefits, while only 150,000-200,000 would continue on for a second, third or fourth year of school.
In weighing the possible programs for financing post-war education, the Osborn Committee explicitly rejected debt financing or need-based grants:
We have rejected both a program based chiefly on loans and a program making financial grants contingent on a showing of need, because we have concluded that either of these programs would discourage many of the ex-service people most capable of helping to overcome the national education deficit, from doing so. With respect to loans in particular, we have believed that a program which would saddle young men and women with relatively heavy indebtedness at the outset of their careers would (even if they would accept it, as many of them would not) be of doubtful wisdom.
The committee thought this an undesirable outcome, particularly in the case of those veterans willing and able to attend professional or postgraduate schools for two to three years before filling an important niche in post-war American society.
President Roosevelt enthusiastically endorsed the report and referred it to Congress in October 1943. By that time, however, the initiative had shifted to the American Legion, an organization founded by World War I veterans in 1919 to promote greater awareness of veteran’s issues. During their September 1943 annual convention, American Legion leaders drafted what they called “a bill of rights for GI Joe and GI Jane,” proposed legislation that included education, unemployment benefits, employment services and home loans for veterans. With the help of the press — and in particular the powerful publisher William Randolph Hearst, a key proponent of the plan — the proposed legislation came to be known as the “GI Bill of Rights,” or simply the “GI Bill.”
Signed into law by President Roosevelt on June 22, 1944 — just two weeks after the Allied landing at Normandy — the educational provisions of the GI Bill, formally called the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, differed from those recommended by the Osborn Committee in one very important respect. Rather than limit educational benefits to one year for all but a few select veterans, the GI Bill allowed veterans to attend the school of their choice for one year plus a period equal to the time the veteran had spent on active duty. Academic leaders met this provision with consternation; the presidents of both Harvard University and the University of Chicago expressed concern that veterans would diminish the educational quality at institutions of higher learning unless only those most qualified were admitted. Despite these reservations, when the war finally drew to a close in the summer of 1945, many veterans had earned up to four years of government-funded education.
What the GI Bill did retain was the Osborn Committee’s bias against debt financing of veteran education. The GI Bill provided a generous $500 per year for tuition, books, supplies, equipment and other necessary expenses, as well as a subsistence allowance of $50 per month for single veterans and $75 per month for veterans with dependents. Only a year after enacting the GI Bill, Congress increased this subsistence allowance to $65 per month for single veterans and $90 per month for veterans with dependents. Just three years after that, the allowance was increased to $75 for single veterans and up to $120 for married veterans with children. Moreover, the GI Bill provided unemployed veterans a readjustment allowance of $20 per week for up to 52 weeks. Popularly referred to as the 52-20 Club, the allowance gave veterans a “cool down” period to recover from the traumatic experience of war.
When the war ended in late 1945, veterans surged into schools across the country in unprecedented numbers. Contrary to the modest predictions of the Osborn Committee, over 7.8 million veterans took advantage of the government program before the law expired in 1956: 2.2 million attended college; 3.5 million went to business or trade schools; 1.4 million enrolled in on-the-job training programs; and 690,000 received farm training. In 1950, the Veterans Administration (“VA”) reported that it had disbursed more than $8 billion to schools for tuition, books, and supplies; $2 billion had been disbursed in 1949 alone. Schools scrambled to provide enough faculty, classrooms, and housing to accommodate returning veterans and their families.
Their arrival came none too soon. Although there is only one comprehensive study of the impact of the GI Bill on higher education, and no study about the impact of the GI Bill on legal education, it is clear that by 1945 many law schools were in dire straits financially. In a 1948 retrospective on the development of legal education, Harvard Law School Dean Erwin N. Griswold observed that “it should not be forgotten that there were nearly four years in which there were virtually no law school graduates. From 1942-1946 the law schools operated on a skeleton basis only, and there were many which were literally closed.”
Boston College Law School was no exception. When Father Kenealy returned from wartime service as a U.S. Navy chaplain in December 1945, he surveyed a profoundly different scene from that of the pre-war years. As early as 1942, enrollment had dwindled to 143 students, with ninety-two of those students on leave. Many faculty members took leaves of absence from 1942 until the end of the war; Father Kenealy himself left from February 1943 until December 1945, during which time he was able to visit the law school only once for a week in March 1945. With only six graduates in June 1945, the law school’s finances grew so dire that the school was forced to relocate to smaller accommodations at Eighteen Tremont Street in Boston the following autumn. The War-Time Report of the Faculty Advisory Committee, submitted to Father Kenealy upon his return, warned that these facilities would be inadequate when veterans returned from war, and might drive prospective students to other area law schools.
Regardless of the facilities, veterans filled the law school’s two classrooms in increasing numbers. The first year class of day students in September 1946 enrolled with 159 students, more than ten times the size of the third year class of fifteen day students. In 1947, veterans represented 86% of the student population, with 412 veterans taking classes during either the day or night sessions. Of those, 303 veterans took classes full-time during the day session, while civilians enrolled predominantly in the evening session. By 1948, 504 veterans attended classes at Boston College Law School; and when the veteran population peaked in 1949 at 623, roughly 90% of the total student population were veterans.
Inevitably, the presence of so many veterans in the law school classroom had an impact on the character of the law school itself — and these older students returning from the battlefields of Europe, Africa and the Pacific brought a decidedly no-nonsense approach to legal education. Impatient to get on with their lives, veterans were especially attracted by the accelerated program, which allowed students to graduate in less than three years. Students in the accelerated program pursued a relentless schedule, attending classes through the summers, taking few holidays, and cramming a bar review into the evenings even as they attended classes during the day. The students themselves did not think the presence or impact of so many veterans remarkable in any way; indeed, the presence of civilians in the day school in the late 1940s seemed more remarkable to them. As one alumnus recalled, “[i]f you didn’t go in the Army, if you were walking around as a civilian, you know, people were making fun of you.”
Perhaps the most dramatic and concrete effect of the massive influx of veterans was economic. In 1941-42, the law school held a reserve of approximately $32,000; by 1945, Father Kenealy returned to find that that amount had shrunk to a mere $1,693. Increasing tuition from $300 to $350 for the day session in 1947, and to $400 in 1948, the law school was able to rebuild its capital position. By 1948, the law school held more than $162,000 in reserve, and Father Kenealy began his plan to build Boston College Law School into a “truly great Catholic Law School of national reputation.” Father Kenealy proposed to build a premier law center outside of the dirty, busy confines of the city, adjacent to the Boston College campus at University Heights in the Boston suburb of Newton. With an estimated construction cost of $1,000,000, Father Kenealy thought he could raise $400,000 through tuition alone by 1952.
In fact, by 1952, the law school had surpassed all expectations, and held just over $516,000 for construction of a new facility. This money was raised largely through tuition increases; tuition at the law school between 1946 and 1949 increased by a roughly a third, with day session rates increasing from $300 to $400 annually, and evening session rates rising from $225 to $300 annually. This increase almost exactly mirrored tuition increases reported by professional schools across the country, which stood on average at twenty-nine percent. These tuition increases had little impact upon the veterans themselves; the increases fit comfortably within the GI Bill allowance of $500 for tuition, books and supplies, leaving veterans approximately $100 a year for books.
Economically, veterans returning to law school found themselves in pretty good shape. Although over fifty percent of all World War II veterans had a family when they attended school, the subsistence allowance of up to $120 a month proved adequate to cover most family living expenses at a time when a family could rent an apartment in Jamaica Plain in Boston for just $33 a month. In fact, the VA fretted that the generous allowances actually encouraged veterans to spend more time seeking education and training than required to facilitate their “readjustment” to civilian life. Those few students at Boston College Law School who could not cover their household expenses supplemented their income by working during the day and attending the evening session.
With tuition and most living expenses paid, veterans left the law school unencumbered by debt. “I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t have any debts,” quipped one alumnus. Although establishing a causal link between debt load and career choices is difficult and perhaps impossible, the classes that graduated in the late 1940s and early 1950s certainly fulfilled Boston College Law School’s stated purpose of preparing “young men and women of intelligence, industry, and character for careers of public service in the administration of justice” like few have either before or since. The class of 1949, dubbed “the class the robes fell on” by Professor and later Judge Hiller B. Zobel, produced six judges, including Massachusetts Superior Court Chief Judge James P. Lynch, Jr. Silvio O. Conte, another member of the class of 1949, represented Massachusetts in Congress for over thirty years. The class of 1950 sent another nine judges to various benches in Massachusetts and the United States. Frank Bellotti, a member of the class of 1952, went on to serve as Lieutenant Governor and later Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.