In 2024, The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025 and so many guiding principles for President Donald Trump's second term, published a white paper bemoaning the low birth rate among married women in the United States. It blamed a surprising culprit: higher education and federal policies that support students, such as subsidized loans. "If the government provides excessively generous subsidies for higher education, women and men are being artificially pushed away from work and into more years in school because they do not want to leave those tax dollars on the table," argued the paper's authors, Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke. Pursuing college meant that young people delayed marriage and starting a family, and, for women especially, that meant a decrease in fertility overall.
The white paper's solution was simple: trash federal support for higher education. "Policy changes can help to stem the tide of declining fertility rates by ending governmental inducements to delay entry into the workforce," it proposed. No longer would people be "staying in school longer, getting trapped with debt, and postponing family formation."
