A Learning Disability

Webb wants to raise the annual allowance to about $22,000—enough to pay tuition and housing at any public university and to provide vets with a decent living expense. A bill he introduced almost a year ago is languishing in committee, in part because the Bush administration opposes it. Last month two Pentagon officials appeared at the committee to explain how the bill would hurt the military. While it would attract recruits, they said, retaining them would be more difficult. "There's a fragile balance here," says Curtis Gilroy, a Pentagon recruiting-policy director. "If the benefit is too large, many troops will leave the military after their first term."

Webb estimates the extra benefits would double the annual price of the GI Bill from $2 billion to $4 billion. Can we afford it? Congressional staffers say the perception on Capitol Hill is no. "It's a great bill, everyone loves it, but it's really too expensive to get out of committee," says one aide who declined to be named so as not to embroil her boss in the argument. Others take a longer view. Jerome Kohlberg, an 82-year-old financier and GI Bill recipient who last week launched a fund to help Iraq vets get through college, believes America wouldn't have prospered had it not been for the government program. "We would have been a moribund country stuck in the mud," he says. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University, says the government made back its GI Bill investment several times over by getting more money in taxes from vets who increased their earning power with college educations.

That was the case with the elder Schelberg. After getting an economics degree, he found himself on a park bench one day next to the director of the only bank in Queenstown, Md. "He told me he was retiring," says Schelberg. "Then he asked me if I wanted to take his job." Schelberg was suddenly managing four people and on his way to a prosperous banking career. He was 25 then, the same age as his grandson now. With the high cost of tuition, Matthew Schelberg also sees banks in his future. But for different reasons.

With Sarah Elkins in Washington

© 2007