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This chapter presents a comparative history of minority communities, in this case the impact of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better known as the GI Bill of Rights). It addresses the reasons why Japanese American World War II veterans were able to make greater use of the benefits offered by the law to broker their group's postwar social advancement, while black veterans were restricted in their enjoyment of its advantages. In addition to more potent discrimination against blacks in areas such as housing, one salient distinction between the groups that the chapter points to is their differing educational preparation, which led to comparatively greater use by Japanese Americans of the college benefits available under the bill.

This chapter examines Cornell University's admission of GI students after World War II. Six months after the end of hostilities, President Edmund Ezra Day, along with eighty-five other presidents of institutions of higher education in New York State, attended a meeting to discuss a strategy for educating and housing the large number of veterans whose tuition, room, and board would be paid by the GI Bill of Rights. Day formed a committee in 1945 to plan for the return of thousands of former Cornell students who had left campus to enter the armed services, as well as new veteran applicants. This chapter considers the problems encountered by Cornell in handling the GI invasion, along with the impact of the war veterans' presence on campus on students. It shows that the GI students brought to Cornell a new sensitivity to discrimination against racial, religious, and ethnic groups. It also explains how the student riots of 1958 helped bring an end to in loco parentis in the university.

The GI Bill of Rights adopted John Andrew Rice and Theodore Dreier's experimental curricula and this was formulated at Black Mountain College. This colleage was found to be different compared to other mainstream colleges. This allowed Arthur Penn to attend college as it meant that he was already paid for. Black Mountain College was established in 1933 as a result of the rebellion and the Depression and it catered to the disenfranchised. The school was able to attract and build various iconoclasts that would provide change and inspiration to the world for the remainder of the century. Sadly it closed twenty-three years later. During Penn's stay at the college in 1947, the Bauhaus were defeated by the Nazis, so some of them went to the States. In America, the Bauhaus were perceived as a gain. Because their credentials fell short and they were thus denied positions at various colleges, the Bauhaus artists opted to return to Black Mountain College.