NCSU Libraries Focus Online

Volume 24 number 3 - Spring 2004

NC State students trudge to class on a snowy morning in February 1948. Quonset huts made of corrugated sheet metal were hastily set up as classrooms between Peele Hall and the 1911 Building on what is today the Court of North Carolina to accommodate the scores of veterans who flooded the campus after World War II.

Enrollment at NC State doubled soon after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the "Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944," better known as the "GI Bill of Rights." The historic law put college or vocational school training within reach of men and women who otherwise never would have been able to further their education, and it had dramatic consequences for the campus, the state of North Carolina, and the nation as a whole.

Although most people associate the GI Bill with its initial impact in the late-1940s, later extensions of the law have provided education and training for millions of Americans returning from tours of duty in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, the Balkans, and elsewhere up to the present day. The NCSU Libraries will mark the GI Bill's sixtieth anniversary this year with an exhibit opening in September that celebrates the enduring legacy of "one of the best-loved and most successful social programs ever sponsored by the American national government."* A symposium later in the fall will bring together former beneficiaries, political leaders, and academics from a variety of disciplines for a discussion of the continued significance of the GI Bill.

*Theda Skocpol, "The G.I. Bill and U.S. Social Policy, Past and Future," in Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (eds.), The Welfare State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 109.