TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bound,John
AU  - Turner,Sarah E.
TI  - Going to War and Going to College: Did World War II and the G.I. Bill Increase Educational Attainment for Returning Veterans?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7452
PY  - 1999
Y2  - December 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7452
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7452.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John Bound
Department of Economics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/998-7149
Fax: 734/998-7415
E-Mail: jbound@umich.edu

Sarah Turner
Department of Economics
University of Virginia
249 Ruffner Hall
Charlottesville, VA  22903-2495
Tel: 434/924-7857
Fax: 434/924-1384
E-Mail: sturner@virginia.edu
AB  - The  end of World War  II brought a  flood of returning veterans to America's colleges and universities.  Yet, despite widespread rhetoric about the  democratization' of higher education that came with this large pool of students, there is little evidence about the question of whether military service, combined with the availability of post-war educational benefits, led these men to increase their investments in education - particularly at the college and university level.  This paper uses the structure of the draft during the World War II period and the changing manpower requirements in the armed forces to address the effects of selection in comparisons of the educational attainment of veterans and nonveterans in this era. Using census data, our results indicate that the net effects of military service and the widely available funding for college through the G.I. Bill led to a moderate gain in the postsecondary educational attainment of World War II veterans.
ER  -