Blindly Discriminating: The GI Bill and Racial Inequality

Christiane Szerman and Lukas Althoff

No 26163, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: The World War II GI Bill was the largest education subsidy in US history and a cornerstone of the postwar US transition to a knowledge economy. Although formally race-blind, the program's decentralized administration left implementation to local officials and segregated institutions, with sharply different consequences for Black and white veterans. This paper quantifies the GI Bill's impact on Black and white Americans' economic outcomes across two generations, using a regression discontinuity around WWII service eligibility cutoffs and a new data linkage from veterans in the 1940 and 1950 censuses to their sons' neighborhood outcomes between 1990 and 2025. The GI Bill widened racial inequality, doubling white veterans' college completion while steering Black veterans into often-fraudulent vocational programs with no earnings returns. The disparities persisted across generations, increasing the white-Black gap in sons' adult-neighborhood outcomes, including a 5-percentage-point (47 percent) widening of the racial college gap. Unequal returns to the same eligibility account for the intergenerational gap, with no contribution from prewar differences in socioeconomic status or geography. In sum, access to the GI Bill was not nearly the same economic opportunity for Black Americans as it was for white Americans, highlighting that race-blind policy does not guarantee racial equality.

Keywords: Racial Inequality; Intergenerational Mobility; Race-Blind Policy; Discrimination; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I38 J15 J62 J71 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mid
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:26163

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