Is Too Much Education Causing the Baby Bust?

According to the Heritage Foundation, over-educated young people are waiting too long to start families. But their arguments don't stand up to scrutiny.

Why has the Trump administration directed so much ire towards universities within its first 100 days? From cancelling research grants to dismantling the Department of Education, which disburses student loans, higher education has been under siege. A recent Heritage Foundation report reveals one surprising reason for many of the administration’s recent moves. In short: conservatives fear that over-educated women aren’t having enough babies.

Heritage is the architect of Project 2025, which is guiding the Trump agenda. In their report, “Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate,” Heritage fellows Jay Greene and Lindsay Burke argue that young people are spending too much time in college and graduate programs, and that subsidies for post-secondary education are “artificially steering people into delaying or even foregoing marriage and children.” Greene and Burke claim that Grad PLUS loans, which allow students to borrow for graduate and professional school, have created “an artificially extended adolescence for the bulk of American young people.” These overgrown teenagers “remain in school much longer, often into their thirties, before they feel equipped to pursue real careers and assume adult roles, including getting married and having children.” Heritage’s solution is to eliminate Grad PLUS loans, end efforts to cancel student loan debt, and eliminate teacher certification requirements for public school teachers. In short, let’s get those youngsters out of school and into baby-making mode.

Me at my Ph.D graduation, willing to breed despite my advanced education

However, Heritage fails to mention that, according to sources they cite in their own report, the biggest recent drops in birth rates in the U.S. are among women with the lowest educational attainment. In 2023, women with a post-graduate degree actually had the highest birth rate of all educational groups (6.1%, or 61 births per 1000 women), whereas women who did not finish high school had the lowest birth rate (3.2%). More educated women do postpone childbearing, which can lead to lower lifetime fertility, but even the Institute of Family Studies (IFS), the right-leaning group whose research is mentioned in the Heritage report, concludes that “the measurable effect of education on birth rates is very small.”

Demographers agree on one of the biggest factors actually dampening the birth rate: the drop in marriages. Fewer than 50% of U.S. adults are now married, a significant drop from the 1960 peak of 72%. For married women, the fertility rate hasn’t changed that much in the last 25 years. What has changed is the share of women who are married. As Lyman Stone of IFS writes, “Essentially all of the decline in fertility since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population.”

And that’s where Heritage’s report really misses the mark. Look closely at marriage rates, and education emerges as a major plus. Pew Research Center data from 2015 finds that 65% of adults with a college degree are married, compared to 50% of those with no education beyond high school. If you ask not-yet-married people whether they plan on marrying, adult without college degrees are most likely to say that their future plans do not include marriage. Education also tracks with divorce rates. In fact, if you want to find families that live up to the purported conservative ideal of a stable two-parent marriage, you’d be best off looking in blue states with high average educational attainment, like Massachusetts, which has the lowest divorce rates in the nation, or at college-educated parents in the liberal bastion of California, of whom 80% are raising children in married two-parent households.

Not only does education predict higher marriage and lower divorce rates, it is a crystal clear predictor of better child outcomes. More educated moms deliver healthier babies, breastfeed longer, and have kids with better language and cognitive skills who go on to do better in school. The kids of more educated moms eat a better-quality diet and get less screen time. Maternal education is such a robust across-the-board predictor of child wellbeing that you can’t study any parenting behavior without controlling for it. More educated parents also make more money and contribute more to the economy.

In blaming too much education for dropping birth rates, the Heritage report also neglects to mention that men are actually completing fewer college and post-graduate degrees, even as men’s fatherhood rates are dropping just as quickly as women’s motherhood rates. There are one million fewer young men currently enrolled in college today than there were in 2011. Right now, 58% of college students are female, and only 42% are male, and this gender gap has grown over time. The gap is even wider at the graduate level: only 36% of graduate students are male. Rather than defund higher education and make it harder to get student loans, the best way to fix low marriage rates among young people might be to encourage more men to catch up to women in terms of educational attainment. In fact, college is an excellent place to meet a life partner. A study of married couples on Facebook estimated that 28% of them attended the same college, about twice as many as the 15% who attended the same high school.

The Institute for Boys and Men’s Richard Reeves has written eloquently about young men’s declining educational attainment. One of his proposed solutions is to increase the numbers of male teachers. And, of course, the way to have more male teachers is to make post-secondary education easier to afford, through programs like the Grad PLUS loans that Heritage wants to eliminate.

A Swedish study that looked at the most fertile career fields found that, for both women and men, choosing a career in healthcare, social care, or teaching is linked with the highest likelihood of parenthood. There is a fascinating tidbit in the researchers’ write-up of their results: “Education leading to public sector employment have also been found to be positively related to childbearing because the public sector offers greater job security and hence a more suitable environment for family building than the private sector. This is one reason why empirical evidence frequently shows that women in public sector jobs have greater childbearing probabilities and higher fertility than those employed in the private sector.”

In other words, if we really want to boost childbearing rates, make it easier for people to find stable jobs serving the public interest (instead of “greedy” private sector positions that wage war on families). Ironically, Project 2025’s Russell Vought, also of the Heritage Foundation and now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, has aggressively sought to disrupt the job security of public sector workers, stating that he wants to “traumatize” them: “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

You can’t gut the public sector, defund education, make it harder for people to get advanced degrees, and expect that a baby boom will magically follow.

One of the oddest arguments in Heritage’s report is that we should eliminate efforts to cancel student debt, as well as loan forgiveness programs that incentivize public service careers. In fact, forgiving student loans is one of the most pronatalist moves we could make on education. Research on millennials find that those carrying high student debt are 42% less likely to have babies.

Another tenet of Heritage’s report is to facilitate school choice to make it easier for families to opt for religious schools. There’s a lot to say about the potential problems with this idea, but most importantly for the purposes of this topic, it’s unclear that this would move the needle on fertility; we know that religiosity boosts the birth rate, but the kinds of families who select religious schools are likely already promoting religious values at home.

If you look at places that are highly religious and have high birth rates, like Utah and Israel, you notice something interesting: average educational attainment is actually pretty high in those places. Utah actually has the third highest average educational attainment in the nation! And Israel has higher average post-secondary education completion than peer OECD nations. These places are often celebrated by conservatives as natalist strongholds, but that’s not because they deprioritize education.

Heritage isn’t wrong about everything. They are correct that there are predatory graduate programs that offer little return on investment. They are also correct that not every job should require a college degree, and that we can encourage career paths outside college, like apprenticeships within industry. They might even be correct that reducing teacher certification requirements could make it easier for people to become teachers, although, given evidence that teachers already have higher birth rates than most workers, it’s not obvious that teacher certification is keeping tons of babies from being born.

And of course, there is much more we can do to facilitate child-having during post-secondary education. I had my first child during my final year of graduate school, while doing the year-long full-time clinical internship that is the capstone requirement to a Ph.D in clinical psychology. I worked with veterans at a VA hospital in Los Angeles. I had my second child during my postdoctoral training, which was funded by a training grant from the National Interests of Health. Both pregnancies were joyful and wanted, but in both cases, I fell through the cracks when it came to maternity leave. During my year of training at the VA, I had not worked long enough to qualify for paid leave and, as a federal employee, did not qualify for state disability coverage. I took an unpaid leave and so did my husband, a freelancer. We counted our pennies. A few years later, I fell into a similar benefits gap because my NIH grant once again made me a federal worker, unable to qualify for state leave. I know what it’s like to try to take care of a newborn when you’ve got no income coming in and are worried about covering bills and expenses. I would have loved to have stayed home longer with both of my infants, but in both cases, it was impossible to afford more than a few weeks off.

Ironically, except for the money piece, graduate school was a great time to have babies; I had kind supervisors in both cases who let me work flexibly, at a time when remote work was not yet typical. I often brought my baby to campus during my postdoc years, where he got tons of love from my colleagues. I would love to create a world where babies on campus are normalized, even celebrated, and students at all levels - bachelors, masters, and doctoral - have the resources to start families.

In short, if we’re worried that young people aren’t having babies, making it harder to afford higher education is not the solution. Instead, we can work to make schools and workplaces friendlier to babies and champion comprehensive, universal paid family leave that isn’t tied to employment, so that families who want children don’t have to fall through the cracks regardless of their stage of training.