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.
thanks for this really thoughtful take on what sounds like a wacky and not-terribly-honestly argued piece from Heritage Foundation. this conversation reminds me of something Sarah Hrdy says, how basically across time and place, when women have more education and more freedom, they have fewer children, which I think is really powerful--not that they don't have *any* kids necessarily (though I think that's a totally valid choice!) but that having more choices often means fewer kids, who are probably better cared for.
it is wild to see so many commenters here blaming feminism for things that are, as you point out, really much more a consequence of capitalism!
Yes - I like the way you put it here - we often blame feminism for the problems of late capitalism. On the flip side, countries with a stronger safety net also tend to be more progressive on gender relations, which is probably a bidirectional relationship (more electoral representation of women --> stronger safety net, but also stronger safety net --> people can't blame women for everything)!
I also enjoyed the baby + PhD graduation photo -- I had my kids in graduate school, too, and it was tough in lots of ways (no leave, so little money) but also great in others, especially flexibility and community. And we had excellent health insurance, thanks to my union!
I work in higher ed, and we talk a lot about "the demographic cliff" and how it is already lowering admissions. There are other reasons for this, of course. And it's interesting to see the statistical connection between education and birth rates, which makes sense: having more education might correlate with a better-paying career, which would make it financially easier to have children.
However, I can't help thinking... higher ed, gender studies, and feminism have helped create a world where women mistrust men, avoid having children, and avoid marriage-- no matter how educated you are, the discourse is public and prevalent. So it seems plausible that higher ed has created some of its own problems.
This is awesome — thanks for sharing. I also wonder how much men not working in the public sector has been due to the fact that it’s largely woman dominated? Much in the same way that women don’t typically *enjoy* being the only woman on an otherwise male team, I think that is true for men too. It’s very easy for us to write this phenomenon off as “well men are toxic so that’s why women don’t like working with them — but if I a man doesn’t like working with mostly women then he’s just a mysoginist” but I do think perfectly good men and perfectly good women are going to operate differently, and I can see why as the public sector and education has come to be dominated by women it has become an unfavorable pursuit for men. I think we really need to take this question seriously because the lack of male teachers is a real detriment to our young male students, many of whom need positive male role models, especially when they are spending 8-10+ hours a day with educators.
I agree that the lack of male teachers is a big problem, and I think you are correct that when fields get more feminized, men tend to opt out of them. Feminized professions also tend to pay worse, and you can see that if you look at trends in teacher pay over the past century. The "teacher pay penalty" - the gap between teachers and other college grads - has grown. So it may be that men are rationally opting out because teaching is an underpaid field. The solution, in my mind, is to pay teachers better and also to treat them better, rather than villainizing them, as the right often does by accusing them of destroying children with wokeist propaganda.
The Harvey Bungus take TLDR: The thru-line is weath, and Trump is simply muddling through a class war that involves two of his opposed constituencies.
1) The through-line is wealth, especially projected future wealth. Education is obtained by the wealthy, and provided to their children. Those children can afford to go to elite (or at least meritorious) colleges, earn sufficiently high incomes, and expect to afford educated children themselves. Those who cannot afford this, cannot afford marriage or college. Children are a luxury good!
2) Discussions of education, especially online, often over-sample the educated, and thus, over-sample the wealthy. A majority of Americans don't have a bachelor's degree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States). The policy desires (and public grievances) for the educated and un-educated are often very different.
Student loan forgiveness is a perfect example. Allowing users to default on education debt would likely be best by the uneducated and those without loans. Loan forgiveness externalizes the cost for those who have loans. This is, simply put, highly regressive, and any claimed positive externalities should be strongly discounted against such enormous public cost.
This distinction is particularly salient to the author's point, that raising a family is easier in school than in a typical private sector job. This conundrum disappears once we consider that the wealthy, educated and married, who wish to pursue family formation, might be deliberately pursuing this path (like me!) So long as the cost for this path is not externalized, there's little to gripe about if you're uneducated. But this simply becomes another way in which policy is regressive if we go with loan forgiveness.
3) The kicker here is that, for the educated, universities (especially elite universities or programs with high wages) position themselves as adversarial to generational wealth, mainly through high tuition and loans, but also he uniformity of time between graduation for various majors, the various requirements of the curriculum, mandatory meal plans, etc. The time to graduation is particularly salient, because if wealth is the through-line, simply taking three years to major instead of four could delay getting a job, delay having a child, etc. This means that even if you were an educated Trump(or Biden!) voter! you likely experienced your university as an obstacle to your end goal.
It is worth noting that tuition-free schools are starting to appear, precisely where large endowments make tuition a rather small portion of revenues anyway. I suspect these universities were well aware that a hostile admin might appear, especially after the implementation of an endowment tax back in 2017.
4) The Trump administration is, like many an administration prior, determined to ensure that some people get more access to elite education, and also that the cost of that education be lower. These are rather conflicted goals! Education is clearly good for individual wages, tuition overall is a great social cost, the rapidly declining degree wage premium asks us to reconcile the difference. Loan forgiveness rewards those taking out loans. Trump is attempting to eliminate a path available to the educated that is unavailable the uneducated. The rewards for winning this fight are smaller and smaller, but relative to opportunity, they are increasing.
5) It is obvious that people would like both a true education, and a credential certifying they ought to be paid great sums. It is obvious that some reward should go to universities for providing this service without causing a debt crisis. It is obvious that this reward should be a cost to the educated, but that extracting massive amounts of value from the educated would retard family formation.
Ultimately, though, I suspect the solutions to this problem are likely far, far away from Harvard - not only because Trump is attempting to take their surplus, but also because Harvard has no interest in becoming like BYU, where loans are optional (https://enrollment.byu.edu/financial-fitness/student-loans), the admission rate and student body grow rapidly, and there is a clear objective of family formation. BYU itself is too educated a place to start - they are clearly doing just fine on this front.
Again, an excellent read. Best of luck in your progressive case for pro-natalism!
This was a really interesting article. I agree that educated mothers do motherhood better—IF and only if they are able to become mothers. I have 2 degrees, am 30 years old, single and deeply, deeply sad about that. I think women outperforming men educationally and professionally is absolutely to blame because there are just not that many men in college, and people in college usually make a decent amount and can make more money as their families grow, which makes men more attractive to women because it means we don’t have to worry about paying bills when we are pregnant and nauseous and swollen. It means we don’t have to stuff our swollen ankles and feet into business casual shoes. It means when our spines hurt or we are severely lethargic, we don’t have to sit under fluorescent lights at a desk and stay awake. Male breadwinners are a lifesaver to women, but women outperforming men makes male breadwinners scarce. I also think colleges have a liberal agenda, which turns off most (but not all) decent men, and which makes the tiny population of men who still go there typically not marriage material. Most college-educated men want (expect) casual sex and an equal breadwinner—which feminism deftly delivered to them. Most women want committed sex and the man to be the primary or sole breadwinner—which feminism destroyed. I have friends who married someone after going to college (or while) and so in their mind, higher education is not a problem for marriage and family-making. But they were actually in the fortunate minority. I wish I didn’t have a graduate degree or a bachelor’s because I know plenty of girls working at the pizza parlor who married a good man without a degree who made good money in a trade or at a car dealership. The problem is, those men don’t want college educated women. Some of them actually say that college educated women who want a career are a turnoff. (Unbeknownst to them, many of us don’t want to work, we HAVE to work.) Higher education backfired for me and for many of us. Also, it’s a numbers game. Colleges can only have so many students, especially with so many women using birth control and tanking the birthrate, which drops admissions and therefore contracts funding for professors and staff and administration as well as programs and extracurriculars. So colleges can only have a certain amount of students, and the capacity for students is now even dwindling thanks to birth control. If women are getting more and more of those coveted spots and outcompeting men, then women almost exclusively are going to be the ones succeeding. Likewise, there can only be so many doctors and so many engineers and so many lawyers. If women are getting all of those jobs, the men have to be the secretaries or the lower-earning jobs. Many of them simply won’t take those leftover jobs, as they are (rightfully) humiliating to masculinity. And if they do take those jobs, those lawyer women don’t want a man making 10 times less than them. I met a 34 year old single lawyer last month. She said the blue collar men on the dating apps tell her, “You should be taking ME on a date.” It’s absolutely heartbreaking to be a woman thrust too high by the indoctrination of liberal and career-minded women, only to find that there are not enough men who want you, there are not enough men who you want, and now the gender roles are reversed which destroys romance. Higher education is awesome! (For men!) I think you (author) honestly must be lucky. Or, as my father says, you have been blessed by God. He has mercifully spared you a level of daily devastation that could hardly be put into words. You’ve avoided an ineffable level of existential misery that allows you to think of your PhD as a good thing. Lest I sound bitter, I just want to say congratulations. I mean that. You are blessed in the way of the Jews who got on ships headed for America and escaped the horrors of Auschwitz with all the rest of their kin. I’m happy for you, albeit in a bittersweet way that acknowledges that only a small minority of us can succeed in your footsteps. Still. As they say, “L’chaim.” 🥂
Thanks for commenting! There is a lot to unpack in your comment and I don't think I will be able to address all the points you made, but I do want to push back on your comment that feminism "destroyed" the breadwinner male. First of all, women have always worked, throughout history and across cultures. For most of human history, we survived as hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers, and women made significant contributions to keep their households fed and alive. So there is no natural law that says that men are supposed to be sole earners.
It is true that women should be able to take time off from work when they are pregnant or have young children, and many countries have managed to figure out how to guarantee 12-18 months of paid leave to new parents.
Like it or not, our economy is such that most families need two incomes to stay afloat. That is not the fault of feminism. That is the fault of late capitalism.
If men are unwilling to go to college, compete academically with women, date a woman who more accomplished than them, and consider secretarial or other traditionally feminine jobs to be "humiliating," that is a problem with the MEN. I think we need to raise boys differently and allow them to develop a more prosocial masculinity that is not so fragile.
Finally, I think that young women who are angry at feminism do not realize how bad it was for women when they had no formal rights or power in society. Women could not go to school and in many families, were not even allowed to learn how to read. It was believed that women's minds were too weak for formal learning. Women could not vote or hold office, could not escape abusive marriages, could not open a bank account or a credit card without their husband's permission (that was true until the 1970s). The "rule of thumb" referred to the width of a stick that your husband was allowed to legally beat you with. If your husband died or left you, you had absolutely no power or recourse besides marrying again. Many women were trapped in horrible marriages with partners who did not respect them. Believe me, you do not want to go back to that time.
I think a lot of women weren’t trapped in those marriages, though. SOME women had bad marriages where patriarchy was a tool of oppression. Others had good marriages where patriarchy was a tool of protection and benevolence. I know both sorts of women. The former rejoices when she’s a widow—as she should. The latter weeps for years, in sorrow and in joy, whenever she remembers her truest friend and confidante—as she should. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, though, and those abused women rightfully made a fuss and rightfully won rights for those women to be free from those bad men, without tempering their crusade to allow for healthy interdependence, so now many of us are free from ALL men, including the good ones, and that’s not liberating at all. It’s deeply confining to find that your biological urges and natural ways of being are absolutely not a possibility for you to live out—not today and not for the foreseeable future without a miracle. Most days, I feel like a salmon swimming home to spawn, only to be blocked by the new construction of a dam or some other artificial obstruction, and about to go belly up at the site of this blockade. Feminism was an overcorrection I think, though I will grant that the problems the feminists were trying to solve were legitimate and evil.
Also, yes women have always worked. But people who point that out often forget that these women often worked in ways that were more akin to “jobs” not “careers.” These jobs could be picked up quickly and abandoned for pregnancy if desired. They didn’t require expensive and time-absorbing college degrees and were not high prestige. Men still wanted those women because they had not yet become their own knights in shining armor—they still very much needed to partner with a (good and honorable) man to thrive, which served men, women, and children well in the ways that bees and pollination and flowers all serve each other cyclically. There’s nothing demeaning about depending on someone else for something in order to thrive. The bees and the flowers both do it and every spring, the world is so beautiful because of it. Dependence is the circle of life, and it’s glorious. Independence, however, is demeaning and ultimately becomes the unnatural death of a species. These women who worked in the past had jobs that could be structured around a life in the home, such as being a seamstress. These women were not primary earner, independent women with girlboss careers. They had pro-family jobs that they flexed around their maternity and their natural femininity and their (fairly, but not completely, ubiquitous) desire to be at home. Formula didn’t exist and women breastfeeding was the only option if the human race was to continue, so women hardly ever had a bonafide career outside the home that would interrupt their most important duty to all humanity. Women weren’t privately heartbroken and secretly confessing this heartbreak to coworkers when discussing how it tears them up to leave a toddler in daycare. In previous generations, they had to be home with the babies and no boss (or society) would have consigned a woman to full-time work outside the home. To do so would have obliterated the human race. Also, in previous generations, married women could get fired from their jobs for taking up a man’s job or a single woman’s job, which shows again that the two-income world is mostly a postmodern creation—and that the idea of women always working in the past is basically an anachronistic fantasy. The following sentence is not an indictment of you as a person, it’s a critique of this line of thought that is frequently deployed against traditional womanhood: To say that “women have always worked” and imply that feminism didn’t drastically change anything is intellectually lazy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst because feminism absolutely and fundamentally transformed the kind of work women did, how and when they did it, what status was afforded to men and women, what motivations women had when seeking employment, and on and on. Feminism utterly redefined women’s work such that comparing women in the workforce before to women in the workforce now is like comparing a Lego train set to an Amtrak.
I also don’t like late stage capitalism. We are probably in agreement about the greed of billionaires and its effects on everyone else. But I think changing gender dynamics accelerated capitalist greed and even became a catalyst for and function of capitalist greed. I think the lust for money and power that the worst of the billionaires exhibit is the same incipient lust for money and power that many contemporary women have. One group (the 1%) did it bigger and worse, but the underlying motivation is the same. Women want to distinguish themselves. Their pride runs parallel with the tycoons, though obviously the track doesn’t usually run as far. These women, many the likes of which I am related to or friends with and therefore intimately acquainted with their thoughts, are essentially embarrassed by what was once termed “women’s work.” They have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove. They want women to rise up, to put men in their place, make sure they are so protected by their money and status that they are never vulnerable to abuse (or love), and make sure everyone knows how capable and smart they are. They want to make sure nobody thinks they are “just a womb,” or “just the incubator of the human race,” as if that’s a lowly, dirty, shameful calling and beneath them. (Obviously you are an exception and kudos to you. Humanity thanks you.) But for the rest of them, in so doing, they have let men off the hook for what men have forever and always been—primary earners, hunters who bring home the bacon, warriors (don’t even get me started on women in combat. Again! Nothing but pride! She needs a medal to feel like she’s equal to a man because motherhood and the standard, safe, domestic, communal lives of women for millennia is so OBVIOUSLY demeaning.) These people who are raising the rent to unlivable prices that require two incomes are actually helped, if not encouraged, by married women who insist on having a career with equal pay to a man. If they can charge us twice as much, why wouldn’t they? Women begged to work and pleaded to shoulder all the burdens of men and reap all the rewards of men, so the billionaires will make sure that’s exactly what we (have to) do.
Also wages don’t go as far as they used to and are proportionally smaller than they used to be. But how could they be anything else? With twice as many full-time out-of-home workers but half the consumers (since birth rates are dropping worldwide and population decline is unavoidable) in what world are anyone’s wages going to be livable? Companies now have two times as many employees to pay, but far fewer customers. How does that make financial sense??? This is all a horrible joke I cannot even begin to laugh at.
Thanks for your comment. I think if you look at the historical record, there is not a lot of evidence for this statement:
"I think a lot of women weren’t trapped in those marriages, though. SOME women had bad marriages where patriarchy was a tool of oppression. Others had good marriages where patriarchy was a tool of protection and benevolence."
The fact is that women were considered to be the inferior, lesser sex. That message pervaded the culture. Scientists literally argued that women's brains were smaller and less powerful than men's. Women were told that they should obey their husbands in all things and they had no right to an opinion or any power outside of their husband's authority. This belief went along with the belief that women needed to be controlled by their husbands because they were incapable of making good decisions on their own.
Given those conditions, I doubt that marriages were high-quality (at least from women's perspective) or that patriarchy was a tool of "benevolence." It's hard to have a good relationship when one person is not respected and has no power. Keep in mind that the idea of marrying for love is a very recent one. Marriage was a property deal and a work arrangement. Romantic love was not part of the picture. Women went from being the property of their fathers to being the property of their husbands. Generally, this was not a great deal for women.
Women who choose to be "tradwives" now might have high-quality relationships but that is because they have the freedom to opt into that path within the larger post-feminist cultural context of women being regarded as full human beings capable of making decisions.
Also, re: the comment that women have always worked, this statement is wrong:
"In previous generations, they had to be home with the babies and no boss (or society) would have consigned a woman to full-time work outside the home."
This is not true for most of human history. Hunter-gatherer mothers worked to feed their communities even when they are pregnant and breastfeeding. Subsistence farmers worked to raise food and take care of animals. I agree with you that the current workplace arrangement of both men and women working outside the home and children being in daycare feels odd and unnatural, but that's the nature of post-industrial workplace, not something that women or feminists created.
Finally, I think this point you make it really interesting:
"These women, many the likes of which I am related to or friends with and therefore intimately acquainted with their thoughts, are essentially embarrassed by what was once termed “women’s work.”"
To me, reading this tells me that feminism has not gone far enough. The early feminists actually wrote about the value and importance of keeping the home and raising children. These jobs were not respected because, see above, women were considered as weak and inferior. So when the first wave of the feminist movement succeeded and women wanted more power, the obvious choice was to look more like men by occupying the roles that men had occupied in the workplace. The problem was that men did not want to occupy traditionally feminine roles, and neither did women, because those roles weren't fully valued and respected. To me, the solution is to value stereotypically feminine qualities and roles as much as we value masculine qualities and roles, and to allow all humans to be as flexible as they want to be in choosing their roles. We can celebrate the stay at home dad and we can celebrate the girl boss. We don't need to erase feminism in order to do that. I actually see this cultural transformation as the next big frontier of feminism.
Thanks for your response as well. I guess after about a decade of taking care of myself, I do feel weak and fragile and incapable of taking care of myself. I do think I need a man’s leadership. I am daily terrified of all sorts of things, from financial decisions to personal safety, and I do attribute those to my female brain—I think it’s less hardy and stable and less durable to withstand the storms of life independently. The most feminist women I know are always married or tied to men, ironically. The strongest women almost always either have a man by their side every day or they have a high body count and the sexual-spiritual union with a number of men to fortify them. A virgin is by definition the most independent woman of all time. She is by definition the uber-female—never once having a man inside her via intercourse or gestation. And from a life as an uber-female, I know I am unimaginably fragile, in a way that sexually active women cannot possibly imagine or embody. But I don’t think of my fragility as synonymous with inferiority, and I think that’s the cognitive error that many men (and women) subscribed to—to all of our peril. I think being female, I am naturally weaker or more delicate, physically and emotionally, and that’s a good thing. I don’t think my brain was made to endure the solo life, and probably very few people (male or female), are made for that, but I think a man could (if given all the social privileges and opportunities modernity gives to women) take care of himself better than I could with all of the same opportunities. That being said, I know I’m smart. I am the equal of any man on a raw intellectual level. I have just as good a brain. I am a biological equal and it’s a shame that wasn’t made clear to everyone centuries ago. But my MIND is different. And I think even mentally, I am an equal, but it’s a different kind of equality. My mind is for different purposes than a man’s mind. I’m not supposed to steward myself and I know that. I should have been in my father’s house until I was transferred to my husband’s. I never belonged in the wild alone. But I am supposed to steward children in a way a man could probably do an OKAY job at, but not a brilliant job at—in the same way that I am a passable self-steward. I pay my bills, I’ll do my taxes tonight, I usually remember to get my oil changed on time. I’m OKAY at this, but a man with all of my education and my same paycheck and my same singleness—he would do better at living on his own than I am doing. And given all of my advantages, he would do better at stewarding a wife (who then stewards the children) than I could ever do if the roles were reversed and I was stewarding my husband who stewards our children. And that’s why I think that patriarchy was benevolent for some women. A girl like me would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from having someone in charge of her, as long as he was loving and ethical and responsible. And I know that there are a lot of women with my psychological makeup out there—fragile people who want and need to be sheltered and for whom patriarchy is a godsend. Certainly, though, I believe it’s not for every woman or every man and I suppose that’s why we are talking past each other. But I will honestly grant that there are people for whom the old arrangement didn’t work and wouldn’t work and for them—I’m glad they don’t have to live that way anymore. Just sucks for the rest of us. The thing is, this war between women is mostly winner takes all. Society will lean heavily in one direction or the other and some women will win everything and others will lose everything, no matter how the arrangement with men goes. I guess in the year of our Lord 2025, I’m one of the losers. May He grant me a miracle.
This is a very interesting comment. I will say that the evidence shows that single men actually do worse on their own than single women-- there is actually a lot of data on this, if you look at everything from health and mortality to psychological wellbeing. Men living on their own have the highest rates of early death and substance abuse, compared to married people and single women. I would not assume that most single men that are super on top of their taxes and bills or that they would be more competent at managing finances for a household. In fact it's frequently the woman's responsibility to take care of those details in many traditional households. So I am not sure I agree that women are more fragile and need to be sheltered more. I just don't think the facts point in that direction.
I do agree that EVERYONE (male or female) belongs within a network of social connections-- that's how we evolved and a natural state of being. We all benefit from support and companionship. But I don't see that in strict male vs female terms. There are men who are better fathers than some mothers, and there are women who are better at car repair and financial planning than some men. I don't think it serves us well to get locked into stereotypes or assumptions about who is "supposed" to do what. We aren't "supposed" to be typing on computers or working in offices, but we've evolved to do that. We aren't living in a world where being taller and having higher upper body strength offer huge economic and status benefits.
In terms of your own situation, I wish you the very best (sincerely) in building your confidence and finding a man who loves, appreciates, and supports you as you deserve.
I figured you would say that and I agree. Single men commit suicide way more than women. But I guess I just mean that a man who is depressed but has all the resources and opportunities at his disposal can actually go out and get a wife and get help. He can propose. Depressed men are often single men, but they are also usually poor men and uneducated men who are single for those two reasons alone. If you take away the poverty and lack of education, those same men would be attractive to women and therefore able to dig themselves out of depression. I on the other hand have “everything” and it’s the very reason I have nothing and am frozen in ice and have no options. I can’t propose. Technically I can, but most men don’t want that and I don’t want that. I can’t pursue men. Technically I can, but most men don’t like that and I don’t like that. My success ruins me and stagnates me. That same success would give a man the opportunity to change his circumstances.
Probably you don’t agree, which is fine. Thank you for your empathy anyway. ♥️🙂
Yes, as you predicted, I disagree! When you ask young men what they value in a partner, many men say they want someone who is ambitious and financially successful. I personally am married to someone in the arts and I have the more stable income. It works for us! I don't care how much money he makes and he doesn't care how much money I make. It all goes to the same place. But we also split the household stuff too. My two cents is that I think you are looking at the wrong kinds of guys...men who want women to be submissive to them are often not the nicest or most empathetic people. But I do very much wish you the best in finding the right partner down the road.
thanks for this really thoughtful take on what sounds like a wacky and not-terribly-honestly argued piece from Heritage Foundation. this conversation reminds me of something Sarah Hrdy says, how basically across time and place, when women have more education and more freedom, they have fewer children, which I think is really powerful--not that they don't have *any* kids necessarily (though I think that's a totally valid choice!) but that having more choices often means fewer kids, who are probably better cared for.
it is wild to see so many commenters here blaming feminism for things that are, as you point out, really much more a consequence of capitalism!
Yes - I like the way you put it here - we often blame feminism for the problems of late capitalism. On the flip side, countries with a stronger safety net also tend to be more progressive on gender relations, which is probably a bidirectional relationship (more electoral representation of women --> stronger safety net, but also stronger safety net --> people can't blame women for everything)!
That's such a helpful and clear way to put it, thank you!
I also enjoyed the baby + PhD graduation photo -- I had my kids in graduate school, too, and it was tough in lots of ways (no leave, so little money) but also great in others, especially flexibility and community. And we had excellent health insurance, thanks to my union!
I work in higher ed, and we talk a lot about "the demographic cliff" and how it is already lowering admissions. There are other reasons for this, of course. And it's interesting to see the statistical connection between education and birth rates, which makes sense: having more education might correlate with a better-paying career, which would make it financially easier to have children.
However, I can't help thinking... higher ed, gender studies, and feminism have helped create a world where women mistrust men, avoid having children, and avoid marriage-- no matter how educated you are, the discourse is public and prevalent. So it seems plausible that higher ed has created some of its own problems.
Israel has super high rates of female education and also super high fertility rates. We should learn from them.
This is awesome — thanks for sharing. I also wonder how much men not working in the public sector has been due to the fact that it’s largely woman dominated? Much in the same way that women don’t typically *enjoy* being the only woman on an otherwise male team, I think that is true for men too. It’s very easy for us to write this phenomenon off as “well men are toxic so that’s why women don’t like working with them — but if I a man doesn’t like working with mostly women then he’s just a mysoginist” but I do think perfectly good men and perfectly good women are going to operate differently, and I can see why as the public sector and education has come to be dominated by women it has become an unfavorable pursuit for men. I think we really need to take this question seriously because the lack of male teachers is a real detriment to our young male students, many of whom need positive male role models, especially when they are spending 8-10+ hours a day with educators.
I agree that the lack of male teachers is a big problem, and I think you are correct that when fields get more feminized, men tend to opt out of them. Feminized professions also tend to pay worse, and you can see that if you look at trends in teacher pay over the past century. The "teacher pay penalty" - the gap between teachers and other college grads - has grown. So it may be that men are rationally opting out because teaching is an underpaid field. The solution, in my mind, is to pay teachers better and also to treat them better, rather than villainizing them, as the right often does by accusing them of destroying children with wokeist propaganda.
A STEM degree will pay for itself. Few others will.
We have far more lawyers than we need. Many wind up in other fields.
Employers need to screen applicants. Aptitude testing is effectively illegal. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. A degree is an inferior substitute.
The sex imbalance in college may be due to women’s greater susceptibility to social pressure. Men don’t see it as cost effective.
The divorce rates cited are per 1k population, not per 1k marriages. It’s misleading.
Student loan forgiveness is more accurately called student loan _bailout_.
Hello, a good read indeed.
The Harvey Bungus take TLDR: The thru-line is weath, and Trump is simply muddling through a class war that involves two of his opposed constituencies.
1) The through-line is wealth, especially projected future wealth. Education is obtained by the wealthy, and provided to their children. Those children can afford to go to elite (or at least meritorious) colleges, earn sufficiently high incomes, and expect to afford educated children themselves. Those who cannot afford this, cannot afford marriage or college. Children are a luxury good!
2) Discussions of education, especially online, often over-sample the educated, and thus, over-sample the wealthy. A majority of Americans don't have a bachelor's degree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States). The policy desires (and public grievances) for the educated and un-educated are often very different.
Student loan forgiveness is a perfect example. Allowing users to default on education debt would likely be best by the uneducated and those without loans. Loan forgiveness externalizes the cost for those who have loans. This is, simply put, highly regressive, and any claimed positive externalities should be strongly discounted against such enormous public cost.
This distinction is particularly salient to the author's point, that raising a family is easier in school than in a typical private sector job. This conundrum disappears once we consider that the wealthy, educated and married, who wish to pursue family formation, might be deliberately pursuing this path (like me!) So long as the cost for this path is not externalized, there's little to gripe about if you're uneducated. But this simply becomes another way in which policy is regressive if we go with loan forgiveness.
3) The kicker here is that, for the educated, universities (especially elite universities or programs with high wages) position themselves as adversarial to generational wealth, mainly through high tuition and loans, but also he uniformity of time between graduation for various majors, the various requirements of the curriculum, mandatory meal plans, etc. The time to graduation is particularly salient, because if wealth is the through-line, simply taking three years to major instead of four could delay getting a job, delay having a child, etc. This means that even if you were an educated Trump(or Biden!) voter! you likely experienced your university as an obstacle to your end goal.
It is worth noting that tuition-free schools are starting to appear, precisely where large endowments make tuition a rather small portion of revenues anyway. I suspect these universities were well aware that a hostile admin might appear, especially after the implementation of an endowment tax back in 2017.
4) The Trump administration is, like many an administration prior, determined to ensure that some people get more access to elite education, and also that the cost of that education be lower. These are rather conflicted goals! Education is clearly good for individual wages, tuition overall is a great social cost, the rapidly declining degree wage premium asks us to reconcile the difference. Loan forgiveness rewards those taking out loans. Trump is attempting to eliminate a path available to the educated that is unavailable the uneducated. The rewards for winning this fight are smaller and smaller, but relative to opportunity, they are increasing.
5) It is obvious that people would like both a true education, and a credential certifying they ought to be paid great sums. It is obvious that some reward should go to universities for providing this service without causing a debt crisis. It is obvious that this reward should be a cost to the educated, but that extracting massive amounts of value from the educated would retard family formation.
Ultimately, though, I suspect the solutions to this problem are likely far, far away from Harvard - not only because Trump is attempting to take their surplus, but also because Harvard has no interest in becoming like BYU, where loans are optional (https://enrollment.byu.edu/financial-fitness/student-loans), the admission rate and student body grow rapidly, and there is a clear objective of family formation. BYU itself is too educated a place to start - they are clearly doing just fine on this front.
Again, an excellent read. Best of luck in your progressive case for pro-natalism!
This was a really interesting article. I agree that educated mothers do motherhood better—IF and only if they are able to become mothers. I have 2 degrees, am 30 years old, single and deeply, deeply sad about that. I think women outperforming men educationally and professionally is absolutely to blame because there are just not that many men in college, and people in college usually make a decent amount and can make more money as their families grow, which makes men more attractive to women because it means we don’t have to worry about paying bills when we are pregnant and nauseous and swollen. It means we don’t have to stuff our swollen ankles and feet into business casual shoes. It means when our spines hurt or we are severely lethargic, we don’t have to sit under fluorescent lights at a desk and stay awake. Male breadwinners are a lifesaver to women, but women outperforming men makes male breadwinners scarce. I also think colleges have a liberal agenda, which turns off most (but not all) decent men, and which makes the tiny population of men who still go there typically not marriage material. Most college-educated men want (expect) casual sex and an equal breadwinner—which feminism deftly delivered to them. Most women want committed sex and the man to be the primary or sole breadwinner—which feminism destroyed. I have friends who married someone after going to college (or while) and so in their mind, higher education is not a problem for marriage and family-making. But they were actually in the fortunate minority. I wish I didn’t have a graduate degree or a bachelor’s because I know plenty of girls working at the pizza parlor who married a good man without a degree who made good money in a trade or at a car dealership. The problem is, those men don’t want college educated women. Some of them actually say that college educated women who want a career are a turnoff. (Unbeknownst to them, many of us don’t want to work, we HAVE to work.) Higher education backfired for me and for many of us. Also, it’s a numbers game. Colleges can only have so many students, especially with so many women using birth control and tanking the birthrate, which drops admissions and therefore contracts funding for professors and staff and administration as well as programs and extracurriculars. So colleges can only have a certain amount of students, and the capacity for students is now even dwindling thanks to birth control. If women are getting more and more of those coveted spots and outcompeting men, then women almost exclusively are going to be the ones succeeding. Likewise, there can only be so many doctors and so many engineers and so many lawyers. If women are getting all of those jobs, the men have to be the secretaries or the lower-earning jobs. Many of them simply won’t take those leftover jobs, as they are (rightfully) humiliating to masculinity. And if they do take those jobs, those lawyer women don’t want a man making 10 times less than them. I met a 34 year old single lawyer last month. She said the blue collar men on the dating apps tell her, “You should be taking ME on a date.” It’s absolutely heartbreaking to be a woman thrust too high by the indoctrination of liberal and career-minded women, only to find that there are not enough men who want you, there are not enough men who you want, and now the gender roles are reversed which destroys romance. Higher education is awesome! (For men!) I think you (author) honestly must be lucky. Or, as my father says, you have been blessed by God. He has mercifully spared you a level of daily devastation that could hardly be put into words. You’ve avoided an ineffable level of existential misery that allows you to think of your PhD as a good thing. Lest I sound bitter, I just want to say congratulations. I mean that. You are blessed in the way of the Jews who got on ships headed for America and escaped the horrors of Auschwitz with all the rest of their kin. I’m happy for you, albeit in a bittersweet way that acknowledges that only a small minority of us can succeed in your footsteps. Still. As they say, “L’chaim.” 🥂
Thanks for commenting! There is a lot to unpack in your comment and I don't think I will be able to address all the points you made, but I do want to push back on your comment that feminism "destroyed" the breadwinner male. First of all, women have always worked, throughout history and across cultures. For most of human history, we survived as hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers, and women made significant contributions to keep their households fed and alive. So there is no natural law that says that men are supposed to be sole earners.
It is true that women should be able to take time off from work when they are pregnant or have young children, and many countries have managed to figure out how to guarantee 12-18 months of paid leave to new parents.
Like it or not, our economy is such that most families need two incomes to stay afloat. That is not the fault of feminism. That is the fault of late capitalism.
If men are unwilling to go to college, compete academically with women, date a woman who more accomplished than them, and consider secretarial or other traditionally feminine jobs to be "humiliating," that is a problem with the MEN. I think we need to raise boys differently and allow them to develop a more prosocial masculinity that is not so fragile.
Finally, I think that young women who are angry at feminism do not realize how bad it was for women when they had no formal rights or power in society. Women could not go to school and in many families, were not even allowed to learn how to read. It was believed that women's minds were too weak for formal learning. Women could not vote or hold office, could not escape abusive marriages, could not open a bank account or a credit card without their husband's permission (that was true until the 1970s). The "rule of thumb" referred to the width of a stick that your husband was allowed to legally beat you with. If your husband died or left you, you had absolutely no power or recourse besides marrying again. Many women were trapped in horrible marriages with partners who did not respect them. Believe me, you do not want to go back to that time.
I think a lot of women weren’t trapped in those marriages, though. SOME women had bad marriages where patriarchy was a tool of oppression. Others had good marriages where patriarchy was a tool of protection and benevolence. I know both sorts of women. The former rejoices when she’s a widow—as she should. The latter weeps for years, in sorrow and in joy, whenever she remembers her truest friend and confidante—as she should. The squeaky wheel gets the oil, though, and those abused women rightfully made a fuss and rightfully won rights for those women to be free from those bad men, without tempering their crusade to allow for healthy interdependence, so now many of us are free from ALL men, including the good ones, and that’s not liberating at all. It’s deeply confining to find that your biological urges and natural ways of being are absolutely not a possibility for you to live out—not today and not for the foreseeable future without a miracle. Most days, I feel like a salmon swimming home to spawn, only to be blocked by the new construction of a dam or some other artificial obstruction, and about to go belly up at the site of this blockade. Feminism was an overcorrection I think, though I will grant that the problems the feminists were trying to solve were legitimate and evil.
Also, yes women have always worked. But people who point that out often forget that these women often worked in ways that were more akin to “jobs” not “careers.” These jobs could be picked up quickly and abandoned for pregnancy if desired. They didn’t require expensive and time-absorbing college degrees and were not high prestige. Men still wanted those women because they had not yet become their own knights in shining armor—they still very much needed to partner with a (good and honorable) man to thrive, which served men, women, and children well in the ways that bees and pollination and flowers all serve each other cyclically. There’s nothing demeaning about depending on someone else for something in order to thrive. The bees and the flowers both do it and every spring, the world is so beautiful because of it. Dependence is the circle of life, and it’s glorious. Independence, however, is demeaning and ultimately becomes the unnatural death of a species. These women who worked in the past had jobs that could be structured around a life in the home, such as being a seamstress. These women were not primary earner, independent women with girlboss careers. They had pro-family jobs that they flexed around their maternity and their natural femininity and their (fairly, but not completely, ubiquitous) desire to be at home. Formula didn’t exist and women breastfeeding was the only option if the human race was to continue, so women hardly ever had a bonafide career outside the home that would interrupt their most important duty to all humanity. Women weren’t privately heartbroken and secretly confessing this heartbreak to coworkers when discussing how it tears them up to leave a toddler in daycare. In previous generations, they had to be home with the babies and no boss (or society) would have consigned a woman to full-time work outside the home. To do so would have obliterated the human race. Also, in previous generations, married women could get fired from their jobs for taking up a man’s job or a single woman’s job, which shows again that the two-income world is mostly a postmodern creation—and that the idea of women always working in the past is basically an anachronistic fantasy. The following sentence is not an indictment of you as a person, it’s a critique of this line of thought that is frequently deployed against traditional womanhood: To say that “women have always worked” and imply that feminism didn’t drastically change anything is intellectually lazy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst because feminism absolutely and fundamentally transformed the kind of work women did, how and when they did it, what status was afforded to men and women, what motivations women had when seeking employment, and on and on. Feminism utterly redefined women’s work such that comparing women in the workforce before to women in the workforce now is like comparing a Lego train set to an Amtrak.
I also don’t like late stage capitalism. We are probably in agreement about the greed of billionaires and its effects on everyone else. But I think changing gender dynamics accelerated capitalist greed and even became a catalyst for and function of capitalist greed. I think the lust for money and power that the worst of the billionaires exhibit is the same incipient lust for money and power that many contemporary women have. One group (the 1%) did it bigger and worse, but the underlying motivation is the same. Women want to distinguish themselves. Their pride runs parallel with the tycoons, though obviously the track doesn’t usually run as far. These women, many the likes of which I am related to or friends with and therefore intimately acquainted with their thoughts, are essentially embarrassed by what was once termed “women’s work.” They have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove. They want women to rise up, to put men in their place, make sure they are so protected by their money and status that they are never vulnerable to abuse (or love), and make sure everyone knows how capable and smart they are. They want to make sure nobody thinks they are “just a womb,” or “just the incubator of the human race,” as if that’s a lowly, dirty, shameful calling and beneath them. (Obviously you are an exception and kudos to you. Humanity thanks you.) But for the rest of them, in so doing, they have let men off the hook for what men have forever and always been—primary earners, hunters who bring home the bacon, warriors (don’t even get me started on women in combat. Again! Nothing but pride! She needs a medal to feel like she’s equal to a man because motherhood and the standard, safe, domestic, communal lives of women for millennia is so OBVIOUSLY demeaning.) These people who are raising the rent to unlivable prices that require two incomes are actually helped, if not encouraged, by married women who insist on having a career with equal pay to a man. If they can charge us twice as much, why wouldn’t they? Women begged to work and pleaded to shoulder all the burdens of men and reap all the rewards of men, so the billionaires will make sure that’s exactly what we (have to) do.
Also wages don’t go as far as they used to and are proportionally smaller than they used to be. But how could they be anything else? With twice as many full-time out-of-home workers but half the consumers (since birth rates are dropping worldwide and population decline is unavoidable) in what world are anyone’s wages going to be livable? Companies now have two times as many employees to pay, but far fewer customers. How does that make financial sense??? This is all a horrible joke I cannot even begin to laugh at.
Thanks for your comment. I think if you look at the historical record, there is not a lot of evidence for this statement:
"I think a lot of women weren’t trapped in those marriages, though. SOME women had bad marriages where patriarchy was a tool of oppression. Others had good marriages where patriarchy was a tool of protection and benevolence."
The fact is that women were considered to be the inferior, lesser sex. That message pervaded the culture. Scientists literally argued that women's brains were smaller and less powerful than men's. Women were told that they should obey their husbands in all things and they had no right to an opinion or any power outside of their husband's authority. This belief went along with the belief that women needed to be controlled by their husbands because they were incapable of making good decisions on their own.
Given those conditions, I doubt that marriages were high-quality (at least from women's perspective) or that patriarchy was a tool of "benevolence." It's hard to have a good relationship when one person is not respected and has no power. Keep in mind that the idea of marrying for love is a very recent one. Marriage was a property deal and a work arrangement. Romantic love was not part of the picture. Women went from being the property of their fathers to being the property of their husbands. Generally, this was not a great deal for women.
Women who choose to be "tradwives" now might have high-quality relationships but that is because they have the freedom to opt into that path within the larger post-feminist cultural context of women being regarded as full human beings capable of making decisions.
Also, re: the comment that women have always worked, this statement is wrong:
"In previous generations, they had to be home with the babies and no boss (or society) would have consigned a woman to full-time work outside the home."
This is not true for most of human history. Hunter-gatherer mothers worked to feed their communities even when they are pregnant and breastfeeding. Subsistence farmers worked to raise food and take care of animals. I agree with you that the current workplace arrangement of both men and women working outside the home and children being in daycare feels odd and unnatural, but that's the nature of post-industrial workplace, not something that women or feminists created.
Finally, I think this point you make it really interesting:
"These women, many the likes of which I am related to or friends with and therefore intimately acquainted with their thoughts, are essentially embarrassed by what was once termed “women’s work.”"
To me, reading this tells me that feminism has not gone far enough. The early feminists actually wrote about the value and importance of keeping the home and raising children. These jobs were not respected because, see above, women were considered as weak and inferior. So when the first wave of the feminist movement succeeded and women wanted more power, the obvious choice was to look more like men by occupying the roles that men had occupied in the workplace. The problem was that men did not want to occupy traditionally feminine roles, and neither did women, because those roles weren't fully valued and respected. To me, the solution is to value stereotypically feminine qualities and roles as much as we value masculine qualities and roles, and to allow all humans to be as flexible as they want to be in choosing their roles. We can celebrate the stay at home dad and we can celebrate the girl boss. We don't need to erase feminism in order to do that. I actually see this cultural transformation as the next big frontier of feminism.
Thanks for your response as well. I guess after about a decade of taking care of myself, I do feel weak and fragile and incapable of taking care of myself. I do think I need a man’s leadership. I am daily terrified of all sorts of things, from financial decisions to personal safety, and I do attribute those to my female brain—I think it’s less hardy and stable and less durable to withstand the storms of life independently. The most feminist women I know are always married or tied to men, ironically. The strongest women almost always either have a man by their side every day or they have a high body count and the sexual-spiritual union with a number of men to fortify them. A virgin is by definition the most independent woman of all time. She is by definition the uber-female—never once having a man inside her via intercourse or gestation. And from a life as an uber-female, I know I am unimaginably fragile, in a way that sexually active women cannot possibly imagine or embody. But I don’t think of my fragility as synonymous with inferiority, and I think that’s the cognitive error that many men (and women) subscribed to—to all of our peril. I think being female, I am naturally weaker or more delicate, physically and emotionally, and that’s a good thing. I don’t think my brain was made to endure the solo life, and probably very few people (male or female), are made for that, but I think a man could (if given all the social privileges and opportunities modernity gives to women) take care of himself better than I could with all of the same opportunities. That being said, I know I’m smart. I am the equal of any man on a raw intellectual level. I have just as good a brain. I am a biological equal and it’s a shame that wasn’t made clear to everyone centuries ago. But my MIND is different. And I think even mentally, I am an equal, but it’s a different kind of equality. My mind is for different purposes than a man’s mind. I’m not supposed to steward myself and I know that. I should have been in my father’s house until I was transferred to my husband’s. I never belonged in the wild alone. But I am supposed to steward children in a way a man could probably do an OKAY job at, but not a brilliant job at—in the same way that I am a passable self-steward. I pay my bills, I’ll do my taxes tonight, I usually remember to get my oil changed on time. I’m OKAY at this, but a man with all of my education and my same paycheck and my same singleness—he would do better at living on his own than I am doing. And given all of my advantages, he would do better at stewarding a wife (who then stewards the children) than I could ever do if the roles were reversed and I was stewarding my husband who stewards our children. And that’s why I think that patriarchy was benevolent for some women. A girl like me would benefit TREMENDOUSLY from having someone in charge of her, as long as he was loving and ethical and responsible. And I know that there are a lot of women with my psychological makeup out there—fragile people who want and need to be sheltered and for whom patriarchy is a godsend. Certainly, though, I believe it’s not for every woman or every man and I suppose that’s why we are talking past each other. But I will honestly grant that there are people for whom the old arrangement didn’t work and wouldn’t work and for them—I’m glad they don’t have to live that way anymore. Just sucks for the rest of us. The thing is, this war between women is mostly winner takes all. Society will lean heavily in one direction or the other and some women will win everything and others will lose everything, no matter how the arrangement with men goes. I guess in the year of our Lord 2025, I’m one of the losers. May He grant me a miracle.
This is a very interesting comment. I will say that the evidence shows that single men actually do worse on their own than single women-- there is actually a lot of data on this, if you look at everything from health and mortality to psychological wellbeing. Men living on their own have the highest rates of early death and substance abuse, compared to married people and single women. I would not assume that most single men that are super on top of their taxes and bills or that they would be more competent at managing finances for a household. In fact it's frequently the woman's responsibility to take care of those details in many traditional households. So I am not sure I agree that women are more fragile and need to be sheltered more. I just don't think the facts point in that direction.
I do agree that EVERYONE (male or female) belongs within a network of social connections-- that's how we evolved and a natural state of being. We all benefit from support and companionship. But I don't see that in strict male vs female terms. There are men who are better fathers than some mothers, and there are women who are better at car repair and financial planning than some men. I don't think it serves us well to get locked into stereotypes or assumptions about who is "supposed" to do what. We aren't "supposed" to be typing on computers or working in offices, but we've evolved to do that. We aren't living in a world where being taller and having higher upper body strength offer huge economic and status benefits.
In terms of your own situation, I wish you the very best (sincerely) in building your confidence and finding a man who loves, appreciates, and supports you as you deserve.
I figured you would say that and I agree. Single men commit suicide way more than women. But I guess I just mean that a man who is depressed but has all the resources and opportunities at his disposal can actually go out and get a wife and get help. He can propose. Depressed men are often single men, but they are also usually poor men and uneducated men who are single for those two reasons alone. If you take away the poverty and lack of education, those same men would be attractive to women and therefore able to dig themselves out of depression. I on the other hand have “everything” and it’s the very reason I have nothing and am frozen in ice and have no options. I can’t propose. Technically I can, but most men don’t want that and I don’t want that. I can’t pursue men. Technically I can, but most men don’t like that and I don’t like that. My success ruins me and stagnates me. That same success would give a man the opportunity to change his circumstances.
Probably you don’t agree, which is fine. Thank you for your empathy anyway. ♥️🙂
Yes, as you predicted, I disagree! When you ask young men what they value in a partner, many men say they want someone who is ambitious and financially successful. I personally am married to someone in the arts and I have the more stable income. It works for us! I don't care how much money he makes and he doesn't care how much money I make. It all goes to the same place. But we also split the household stuff too. My two cents is that I think you are looking at the wrong kinds of guys...men who want women to be submissive to them are often not the nicest or most empathetic people. But I do very much wish you the best in finding the right partner down the road.