More important to departing from agriculture than the GI Bill was the industrial development that accompanied things like CCC's and TVA, programs instituted under the New Deal. Even in the Manhattan Project's workers, the vast majority were not college graduates. It was foresight into developing then-untapped or ignored resources and investing in raising the quality of life for the population in general that led to America's postwar prosperity.
For the past thirty years, the average American worker has been seeing a steady decline in quality of life to the point that "Generation X" will be the first in US history to have a lower standard of living than its Boomer parents. This has occurred for various reasons, but most of them were results of federal deregulation of industry, anti-union labor laws, and a rising disparity between taxation of middle-class workers versus that of the affluent. My personal view is that the health care law, however flawed it may be, is an attempt to stem that tide somewhat in a manner similar to civil rights legislation, incrementally.