I think the GI Bill changed the perception of college. Many of us had a father who attended college under it, and figured it was a good thing, so they passed it down (like me).
Before that, you really had to be fairly well off, usually, to consider college, and most jobs were "laymen" jobs. You graduated HS and went to work, everyone did, now everyone didn't. And the job market progressed along side this.
It started the trend, it didn't create it.
First:
Pre-WWII a lot of people didn't even graduate from HS. They started working at 14-17 and dropped out.
Second:
I agree with what you are saying. I also think that the GI Bill benefited the US greatly.
I like to phrase it like this:
Before WWII to get a college degree you had to be a rich white male*.
- The GI Bill removed the restriction to the wealthy.
- The Civil Rights movement removed the requirement to be white.
- The women's movement removed the requirement to be male.
All of this happened in a remarkably short time. For birth year ~1920 and prior, all three restrictions were in place.
By 1945 you didn't need to be wealthy so that was removed for roughly birth years after 1924.
The civil rights and women's movements had removed the racial and gender restrictions by the mid-to-late 1960's so fit birth years after about 1950.
So in around a quarter-century we removed the restrictions. Part of this was motivated by the Cold War. There was a thought that the genius future inventor of some war-winning technology might be a poor, black, or female kid and "we" wanted that kid to go to college and invent not drop out of HS and become a truck driver, share sharecropper, or housewife.
This, IMHO, benefitted the economy greatly because there was a vast untapped pool of students with college ability that had previously been unable to go to college.
American Education policy ever since has been to try to duplicate that. The problem is that we long-ago reached diminishing returns. Ie:
- Going from ~10% heading to college and those 10% not necessarily being the smartest to the smartest 20% got huge results because it sent a lot of really smart people to college.
- Going from 20% to 30% gets lesser results because the new additions are incrementally less intelligent.
- Each addition beyond that is less beneficial than the one before it.
*The restrictions to wealthy white males were not absolute. There were Black Colleges and colleges that admitted non-whites and there were women's colleges and colleges that admitted women but college was mostly restricted to wealthy white males.
