The NDEA was enacted in 1958, authorizing funding for four years. Motivated by the Soviet launch of Sputnik the year before, it more generally was a response to the concern that US Scientists were falling behind Soviet scientists and that education was better in the USSR than in the US. The act was designed to provide more defense oriented personnel (e.g. more mathematicians, foreign language scholars, engineers, etc) and to increase the number of student who could afford to attend college.