In 1946, Syracuse University admitted more than 9,000 veterans in a single semester. Enrollment climbed from 5,716 students the year before to nearly 19,700 by 1948. Chancellor William Tolley, who helped shape the GI Bill in Washington D.C., guaranteed a seat to any returning service member who wanted one. He was not running a charity. He was betting that those coming home from war would return more than they cost.
Sixty years later, I commissioned through Army ROTC on that same campus, deployed to Iraq, and returned in 2010 to help launch what is now the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which has since served more than 230,000 service members, veterans and families. I have spent 15 years watching Tolley’s bet pay off, one veteran at a time. The challenge now is ensuring that the promise he believed in remains as powerful for this generation as it was for his. That means a GI Bill built for today’s careers and accountability for the outcomes it delivers.
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, signed June 22, 1944, was not passed out of gratitude alone. Policymakers feared that 16 million returning veterans would swamp a demobilizing economy and pull the country back into a depression. Congress chose to invest instead. By 1956, 7.8 million veterans had used it: 2.2 million in college, the rest in vocational schools, on-the-job training, and farm programs. A 1988 Joint Economic Committee analysis estimated that the college portion alone returned five to twelve and a half dollars for every dollar spent.
A 1988 Joint Economic Committee analysis estimated that the college portion of the GI Bill alone returned five to twelve and a half dollars for every dollar spent.
Congress continued that strategy. The Post-9/11 GI Bill updated the benefit for an all-volunteer force and made it transferable to family. The Forever GI Bill of 2017 eliminated the 15-year limit for anyone separating after January 1, 2013. This February, the House passed the VETS Opportunity Act to widen access to certificates and technical programs. Each reflected a belief in investing in veterans.
Here is what still troubles me. In fiscal 2025, the Department of Veterans Affairs made $13.7 billion in education benefit payments to more than 933,000 beneficiaries. That is an extraordinary commitment. Yet we still cannot consistently tell veterans, or the taxpayers, which education and training programs deliver the strongest employment and earnings outcomes. The VA’s GI Bill Comparison Tool provides tuition, completion, and complaint information, but not wages or employment outcomes needed for comparisons. The clearest picture arrived recently, from a study linking Census, IRS, and VA records: 54 percent of eligible enlisted veterans used the benefit, and 47 percent of users completed a degree within six years, more than twice the rate of comparable independent students. This is encouraging, but degree completion is hardly the only outcome worth measuring.
Without better information, it is difficult to know which programs deliver on their promises. The Government Accountability Office found that just 44 percent of completed VET TEC enrollments resulted in reported meaningful employment. At trade schools enrolling GI Bill students, fewer than half of all students out-earned a high school graduate a decade after enrolling. Veterans are making consequential financial decisions with less information than they would get buying a used car.
Congress has already directed improvement through the Dole Act, but must do more. The VA should make program-level outcome information accessible through the Comparison Tool. Congress should also make the VA-Census-IRS data linkage a permanent annual product and equip the VA with the tools to act when programs repeatedly leave veterans no better off than when they started. A benefit that cannot demonstrate its return risks being defended as charity rather than investment.
The original GI Bill was built around a 20th century assumption: transition once, get educated or trained, and build a career. Artificial intelligence and technological change are making that assumption increasingly outdated.
But accountability is only half the challenge. The original GI Bill was built around a 20th century assumption: transition once, get educated or trained, and build a career. Artificial intelligence and technological change are making that assumption increasingly outdated. A veteran separating at 25 today may retrain or upskill two or three times before retirement. The GI Bill should evolve accordingly. That does not necessarily mean a larger benefit. It means a more flexible one, usable across a working lifetime: a degree at 25, a new credential at 35, training in AI or cybersecurity at 45. Congress is already moving that way through VET TEC and wider access to certificates. The next step is to build the benefit around lifelong learning rather than a single transition out of uniform.
That flexibility must come with accountability. As veterans navigate changing industries and multiple careers, they need reliable evidence about which programs actually lead to opportunity and which do not. Modernization should expand choice, but accountability must ensure those choices deliver results.
Tolley’s generation had no earnings data. They had a hunch and an obligation, and they were right. We have the records, the researchers, and the statute. The least we owe the next generation is to find out whether the bet is still paying off.
Raymond Toenniessen is the Deputy Executive Director at the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families. Toenniessen graduated from Syracuse University and commissioned from its ROTC program as a Second Lieutenant. He served four years on active duty including a combat deployment to Iraq in 2008 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his service.