American colleges and universities are panicking, for good reason.
Enrollment across all of academia has been dropping for years, and starting now, there will be fewer and fewer college-aged people every year for the forseeable future.
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Colleges are scrambling for a way to survive. Big schools are slashing their course offerings. Small schools are making desperate plays to find a niche in a shrinking market.
The bitter irony is this: American colleges and universities brought this crisis on themselves.
The Baby Bust has a thousand causes, but some of the most significant anti-natal cultural and economic trends were created by America’s colleges and universities.
From anti-family feminism to extended adolescence, through unreasonable expectations and mountains of debt, colleges created conditions that put their own survival at risk by turning out graduates who were indisposed to creating the next generation.
Postponing life
In 2007, the public had 4.32 million babies, and a Total Fertility Rate of 2.12 babies per woman — right about the “replacement level” at which a population can hold stable. Since then, the number of babies born has dropped nearly every year, reaching 3.61 million in 2025, giving us a Total Fertility Rate of 1.79.
As a result, there are fewer Americans under 18 than there were a decade ago. We’ve passed Peak Child as a country.
The Baby Bust began 18 years ago, which means that last Spring’s high school graduating class was the largest one for the foreseeable future. Basically, every year for at least the next 18 years, the number of potential college freshmen will fall. The high school class of 2044 will be about 16% smaller than the class of 2026 was.
What has caused the Baby Bust? A thousand factors, including the financial crisis, the iPhone, and secularization. But some of those causes came out of academia itself.
Most obviously, young people are starting their adult lives — and their families — later and later every year. The biggest reason is higher education.
In 1990, about 24% Americans aged 25-34 had a college degree. Now it’s more than 42%. That’s a 75% rise.
Increasingly, a white-collar job seems to require an advanced degree, which pushes folks into their late 20s before they even enter the workforce.
Colleges (outside of BYU and a handful of others) make it very clear that one is not to get married or even consider having children until after graduation. As a tangible sign of this norm, only about 8% of colleges and universities offer housing for students who are parents, according to the Campus Family Housing database.
As a result, Americans are getting married later. In 2006, before the Baby Bust, the average age at first marriage was 25 for women and 27 for men according to Census data. Now it is nearly 29 for women and 31 for men. That number moves later as educational attainment increases.
These numbers are medians, which indicates that most Americans make it into their 30s never having been married. That majority is larger among college grads, and much larger for those with graduate degrees.
Waiting longer before starting a family increases the odds that one might never have children (especially because fertility declines throughout one’s 30s), and it mechanically reduces the birth rate simply by spacing out the generations.
Also, college graduates enter adulthood with significant debt. A majority of people with a bachelor’s degree borrowed to pay for it, and the median amount of debt among that majority is over $25,000.
All of this leads to later — and thus less — family formation.
Resort life
Follow the cultural debate on social media, and you will get an insight into the mind of a Gen Z’er who sees family as out of reach.
You will see them complain about a budget that includes food delivery, and then defend themselves by saying that the ability to cook oneself dinner is a privilege, and that it is oppressive to suggest one rely on store-bought Ramen noodles for dinner sometimes.
You will see them react with horror to the idea of sharing a room with a friend or even a sibling.
And you will wonder where they got the idea that a normal American in his or her 20s should live a comfortable life.
The answer, for many, is college.
If your idea of college is rubber chicken on Wednesday nights and chipped linoleum floors in a drafty dorm room, you should update that picture for today. Elite schools and large public universities often look like resorts rather than upscale prisons. Subsidized heavily by the federal government, there’s only so much these schools can spend on instruction, so they compete with one another by making the experience more pleasant.
One result is 22-year-old graduates accustomed to luxury. If they grew up middle-class or above, they never experienced the temporary poverty that defined college for Gen. X, and defines the years of being newlywed with children in one’s 20s.
These expectations set by colleges probably delay family formation, because having kids entails financial sacrifices, especially if one has those kids in one’s 20s.
Feminism and workism
Finally, colleges have fueled the Baby Bust by peddling anti-family ideologies.
While some strains of feminism seek to uplift motherhood, the feminism of modern academia is more individualistic and dedicated to gender symmetry — that is, trying to erase differences between men and women.
A feminism that seeks to dismantle the “systems of oppression,” including the patriarchy, is always going to be an anti-feminism. A feminism that worships individual autonomy is going to steer women away from the self-giving involved in marriage and motherhood. And a feminism that bristles at “traditional gender roles,” is going to fit awkwardly, at best, into the nuclear family grounded and lifelong monogamous marriage.
More importantly, though, colleges and universities wordlessly preach the religion of workism.
Colleges market themselves to applicants as the best path to a successful career. They provide career preparation. If you are in college and an adult is helping you “think about your future plans,” they are almost solely talking about grad school and a job. The other major part of one’s potential “future plans” — getting married and having kids — is an afterthought at most.
In short, college trains young adults to worship at the altar of career, and that set of values is surely reducing marriage and birth rates. Combine this with anti-family feminism and accustoming graduates to luxury, and college looks like a machine built to eliminate the norm of getting married and starting a family.
