So http://somesmalltruths.blogspot.com/2017/03/everything-wrong-with-college.html makes the point that university enrollment didn't really take off until the GI Bill, and that got me thinking.

So the US wants its officer class (and potential officer class in case of another world war) to be college-educated, so they "pay for college". The majority of the former grunts put themselves into programs with practical applications, such as engineering, agriculture sciences, or business, where a smaller percentage went full-on liberal arts education. There they met the real customers of the university experience at that time: the children of society's elite who viewed university as a finishing school/singles bar/networking opportunity. This probably wasn't as big a culture clash as it would it appear, since the grunts were used to dealing with elites (in the form of their own officers), and the students were too young/untrained to effectively order a separated corporal around.

So how the hell did we go from what should have been a fantastic experiment in commingling a tough group of "hierarchy" guys with status game players and having them all learn something about the other like an after-school-special to sticking flowers in the ends of rifles and calling ROTC guys baby-killers *in one goddam generation*? Did the GIs outcompete the nobs for chix? Did they cooperate with the proto-commies early on since they had just got done fighting fascists? (seems unlikely). Did the professors object to and react to the "retrogrades" in their midst by doubling down on Marxism?

It just seems like this is a place where the roots of the current culture war flare-ups should be, since the counter-culture of the 60s would have grown out of it, and yet I don't know any stories or even narratives about college at this time. Could the GIs have *won* this part of the culture war and converted elites whose children went on to rebel 20 years later?