In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt signed legislation that transformed the country. A Syracuse University chancellor, also a veteran, helped shape it. Eight decades later, the institution he led is still honoring the commitment that bill made possible.

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By the spring of 1944, it was clear that World War Two war would be won. What was less clear was what would happen next. More than 16 million Americans had served, they would come home in waves, and they would come home changed: older than when they left, shaped by experiences most civilians could not imagine, and facing a civilian economy that had not fully reckoned with what it would mean to absorb them all at once.

The country had a recent and painful reference point for what happened when that reckoning failed. In 1932, thousands of World War I veterans, still waiting for a bonus Congress had promised and then delayed, marched on Washington. The Bonus Army, as they came to be known, camped on the National Mall in makeshift shanties. President Hoover ordered federal troops to clear them out. The images of soldiers routing veterans from the capital made national news and left a scar on the country’s conscience that had not fully healed a decade later.

Franklin Roosevelt was determined not to repeat it. Well before the war ended, his administration began planning for what a returning veteran workforce would need. The result, signed into law on June 22, 1944, was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill of Rights.

The legislation offered three foundational benefits: funding for education and vocational training, low-interest loans for homes and businesses, and unemployment compensation for veterans who needed time to find work. On paper, it was a social welfare program. In practice, it was the largest single investment in human capital in American history.

The Impact of Coordinated Legislation

The scale of what followed is difficult to overstate. By 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of all college enrollment in the United States. The number of degrees awarded by American colleges and universities more than doubled between 1940 and 1950. An entire generation of Americans, most of whom would never have set foot on a college campus under ordinary circumstances, came home from war and went straight to school.

The economic consequences compounded over decades. The GI Bill became one of the primary engines of the postwar economic expansion that defined American prosperity for 30 years. College-educated veterans moved into the middle class, bought homes in the suburbs, started businesses and raised families in communities that had not existed before the war. The return on the federal investment has been estimated at seven dollars for every dollar spent.

That outcome was not inevitable. The GI Bill’s education benefits followed the veteran to the institution of their choice, which meant the surge landed wherever veterans chose to enroll. In 1947, nearly half of those veterans had concentrated at just 38 colleges and universities. Most institutions eventually absorbed veterans into their existing structures. A smaller number made a different choice: to build the infrastructure to serve veterans as a distinct population, on their own terms, before the wave arrived. Syracuse University was in that smaller group, and its chancellor was one of the reasons why.

The Chancellor Who Opened the Doors

William Pearson Tolley had been chancellor of Syracuse University since 1942. He was, in several respects, exactly the right person in exactly the right position at exactly the right moment. As a young man, he had himself received college credit through the Student Army Training Corps at Syracuse University during World War I, giving him a personal insight into what education could mean to a veteran at a crossroads. As a national education leader, he served on the presidential committee that consulted with the Roosevelt administration during the drafting of the GI Bill and worked with Congress in shaping the legislation’s language.

What separated Tolley from his peers was not simply that he supported the bill, it was that he acted on it before most institutions had even begun to plan. While the president of the University of Chicago was warning in a 1944 editorial against admitting veterans, Tolley was moving in the opposite direction. He announced what Syracuse called a “Uniform Admissions Program.” A guarantee, made in advance and in public, that every military service member would have a place waiting for them at the university when they came home. He wrote to veterans directly, telling them the university was prepared to help them chart their own educational paths, tailored to their specific needs and aspirations.

The response was dramatic and immediate. In 1946, Syracuse welcomed more than 9,000 veterans in a single semester, nearly doubling the student body overnight. Total enrollment rose from 5,716 in the 1945-46 academic year to 19,698 by 1948-49. The university ranked first in New York State and 17th in the country in veteran enrollment.

Tolley later recalled his thinking in those months with a directness that has not aged: “I realized that if a veteran didn’t go to college as soon as he came back, he’d never have another chance. It was now or never. Now was not the time to shut the doors. Our doors opened wide in 1946.”

Syracuse also adapted its programs to serve veterans rather than expecting veterans to conform to existing structures. The university offered an accelerated program that compressed a four-year degree into two and a half years. It admitted veterans who had not graduated from high school, provided they could pass an entrance exam. It created personal and vocational counseling services, speech and hearing therapy, and other support programs that had no precedent in prewar higher education. The distinction was not that Syracuse opened its doors while others kept theirs shut. It was that Syracuse rebuilt what was behind those doors to be worthy of the people walking through them.

The Legislative Gap and an Unfinished Promise

The GI Bill’s legacy is not uncomplicated. Its benefits were administered through state and local systems where Jim Crow laws and discriminatory practices severely limited access for Black veterans. In New York and northern New Jersey alone, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages backed by the GI Bill went to non-white borrowers. Black veterans were turned away from universities and denied loans by banks that eagerly served white veterans. The same legislation that built the white middle class largely bypassed the Black veterans who had served alongside them.

That history belongs in any honest accounting of the bill’s legacy. It also belongs in any honest accounting of what still needs to be done. The gap between what the GI Bill promised, and what it actually delivered to all veterans, has never fully closed. The downstream effects of that inequity, in wealth, in homeownership, in educational attainment, remain measurable today.

An Inherited Responsibility to Answer the Call

When Syracuse University founded the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families in 2011, it wasn’t starting from scratch. It was building on eight decades of institutional commitment that ran directly through Tolley’s 1944 pledge and the GI Bulge that followed. The university that had ranked first in New York State for veteran enrollment in 1946 was  recognized multiple times as the number one private school in the country for veterans between 2017 and 2020, and it has consistently ranked among the top private schools across the country for veterans seeking higher education through online distant learning.

The IVMF’s entrepreneurship programs are the direct programmatic descendants of the GI Bill’s small business loan provisions. The Onward to Opportunity career training program, which has prepared more than 100,000 service members, veterans and military spouses for civilian employment, extends the GI Bill’s original conviction that the transition from military service to economic productivity is something a nation can and should invest in.

The GI Bill also helped establish what IVMF’s work has consistently documented: that the return on investment in veteran transition are not charity, they are economic drivers. Every dollar spent helping a veteran into a career, a business or a stable community life returns more than it costs, in tax revenue, in economic activity, in reduced demand on public services. FDR understood this in 1944, and the institutional data now confirms it in ways his administration could only estimate.

Tolley once wrote that the goal of Syracuse’s veteran initiative was to help individuals “customize their educational paths to specific needs and aspirations.” That sentence could serve as IVMF’s mission statement today. The specific programs have changed. The technology has changed. The demographics of the veteran population have changed significantly. What has not changed is the core proposition: that the men and women who serve this country deserve institutions ready to meet them where they are, on their terms, with the full commitment of higher education’s resources behind them.

In a nation turning 250, that proposition is not new. It is inherited.