College on the GI Bill
In 1947 — the year this photo was taken of a crowded lecture hall at the University of Iowa — more than 6,000 of this university’s 10,000 students (60 percent) were veterans whose education was financed by the GI Bill. Across the country, American universities were bursting at the seams from the massive enrollment of World War II veterans. Government financing of college education for these vets made the U.S. workforce one of the best educated in the world in the 1950s and 1960s. Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.