About 16 percent of veterans use the GI Bill to attend private institutions, roughly the same proportion as students generally. But at the most highly selective colleges, veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill barely fill a single classroom--38 at Penn, 22 at Cornell, and at Princeton, just one. The sparse numbers do not go unnoticed, veterans say.…

When Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat from Virginia, introduced his "21st-Century GI Bill" last year, he predicted that it would give veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the same educational opportunities that World War II veterans received under the original GI Bill of Rights, signed into law more than a half century ago. Webb's…