A self-inflicted academic crisis

Our collapsing fertility rate has become a matter of increasing interest to elite thinkers such as Elon Musk and many others.

A key intellectual source of this fertility collapse is academia. Secular liberal universities and colleges have incubated anti-family, anti-marriage, and anti-childrearing thought.

Ironically, these ideas are now leading to the destruction of the very institutions that advanced them first as admissions offices begin to reach the “demographic cliff.”   

You can certainly see this thought developed in environmentalist academic literature. But perhaps we most powerfully see its cultural influence in the advance of women’s studies.      

The first women’s studies program was created at San Diego State University in 1970 with a grant from the Ford Foundation. These programs are perhaps better described as anti-family centers, as they advance an “us-vs-them” dialectic that pits the sexes against one another. They now exist on more than 900 university campuses.

Marriage is often presented by these academics as an institution that  perpetuates oppression and one that society ought to minimize.      

Their research has become interdisciplinary and has advanced their hostility to marriage and the family across the academy and, as a consequence, elite society. Graduates of these programs are very likely the childless cat ladies J.D. Vance was referencing—not the women who seek marriage but have been unable to find marriageable men.      

These academics have engineered a generation that embraces the idea that, at best, marriage is an optional life-accessory on a list of many with equal or similar value. Frequently, striving parents parrot the notion that a career is far more important to focus on first.    

But we often reap what we sow. Today, many elite parents who have imbibed this worldview worry about when and if they will become grandparents.

Many in the academy now fret about collapsing demographics. A Wall Street Journal report found that over the last decade college and university closures have tripled with more than 500 closings. After more than 50 years of academics undermining marriage, admissions departments are finding out that they are short of potential students.    

According to Vox.com, we are “starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades.” Those in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”    

With hundreds of colleges and universities across America already struggling to keep the doors open, a Forbes contributor wrote that campuses “may not be viable in their current form for much longer.”

The effect of the educational bias toward career-above-marriage-and-family has flowed throughout society.  Fewer American 20-and-30-somethings than ever before tie the knot annually. According to the  Pew Research Center, as of 2021, a quarter of 40-year-olds in the United States had never been married. The New York Times  reported that a much larger percentage of young adults believe “making a good living” is more fulfilling than making a matrimonial match.    

But sociologist Brad Wilcox’s research shows that the happiest and most fulfilled Americans are those who take a family first approach. Married parents are among the happiest of Americans. Married people also live longer on average than single people, so the decline in marriage is helping fuel our historic drop in life expectancy.      

Meanwhile, in what should be obvious but is often ignored, declining marriage has caused plunging birth rates. Fertility among the married is not significantly different from where we were in the mid-1990s. There are just a lot fewer married people in the population today than in the mid-'90s.    

As a consequence, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the birth rate is now down to 1.6 births per woman. For perspective, a birth rate of 1.6 means the population will fall by half in 50 years.      

So, other than declining happiness, shorter lifespans, greater income gaps, more crime, and the loss of half of our population in 50 years, this shift away from marriage is great.      

Truly, these trends will continue to worsen until we once again recognize the role the stable nuclear family plays in our nation’s overall health, our personal well-being, and our prosperity, and we encourage and champion strong marriages. Among  other scholars, David C. Ribar, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, supports this opinion in a paper titled “Why Marriage Matters for Child Wellbeing.”    

Many conservative, faith-based colleges and universities take the opposite view of their liberal, secular counterparts. Marriage and the nuclear family are the joint cornerstone of our country. They’re the dual bedrock of our national well-being and prosperity.      

Yet, I don’t expect the existing academy to course correct on its own. Parents and pastors must step up now to model and teach self-control and the skills of healthy relationships and marriage. They must also actively encourage a return to the historical norm that prioritizes marriage early in our lives.      

Long-ago an economist friend told me that there is an old saying in his field, “A trend that can’t go on forever—won’t.” The ongoing operation of many of America’s colleges and universities over the coming decades will be one such trend that won’t continue.