re: #149 prairiefire

Too much doom and gloom! Social Security paved the way for the great middle class expansion after WW2. My great grand parents were hard scrabble farmers until Social Security. When that was in place, my grand parents were free to have their own careers and families with out supporting the previous generation.

The GI Bill gets my vote for the single most beneficial government program in history. It allowed millions of young people to go to college who would otherwise not have gone.
It transformed the educational landscape in this country. Before the GI Bill, you had to be at least affluent, or a very good athlete, to go to college at all. Afterward, millions who had already learned the hard way about discipline and hard work could, and did, go.
Today, we have Pell grants and the rest of the vast panoply of financial aid, but it was the GI Bill that really set the stage for these. We would not even have had the professors to meet the demand when these programs were introduced if not for the huge number of veterans who pursued their educations all the way to tenure. When I was in college in the early 70s, it seemed as though every other prof was a WW2 vet and a GI Bill beneficiary. This was at an Ivy League school, too, and it must have been even more important in public universities.