Birth rates are plummeting in the United States and globally, forecasting a political and financial crisis. The most recent estimate predicts the average American woman will have 1.6 children in her lifetime, far below the rate of 2.1 required to maintain a steady population and even further below the 2.5 rate observed in the United States as recently as 1970.

Many cultural and technological factors have contributed to this dramatic decline, and public policies play a role in shaping people’s decisions about whether to have children and how many. Finding the right policy levers for influencing fertility rates, however, has proven very difficult.

Countries such as Hungary and South Korea, operating on the assumption that fertility is primarily constrained by the costs of raising children, have offered very generous government subsidies for families having children to offset those costs. Unfortunately, their fertility rates haven’t risen, so these large expenditures clearly haven’t helped.

But it’s unlikely they would have anyway, as child-rearing expenses do not appear to be the main obstacle to people choosing to have more children. Remember, fertility rates used to be much higher even when people had significantly less money than they do now.

For example, in 1970, when the U.S. fertility rate was at 2.5, per-person gross domestic product was almost one-third what it is today. Somehow, people with a lot less money managed to have many more kids.

Can Policy Affect Fertility?

If we can’t effectively pay people to have more children, some may despair that there is nothing public policy can do to alter fertility rates. In a society where birth control is widely available and children are not needed to work on the farm, some have resigned themselves to the idea that perhaps people just don’t want to have enough children to sustain populations.

But it is worth remembering that, in 1970, few children were needed to work on farms, and the birth control pill had been around for a decade, yet fertility rates were much higher than they are now. In addition, creating new financial incentives for people to have children is not the only arrow in the policy quiver. We need to consider how existing government programs may be suppressing fertility rates and how reforming or eliminating those programs could make a significant difference.

Government policies often produce unintended consequences that promote behaviors that are antithetical to family formation. If we simply stop putting the government thumb on the scale in favor of policies that push people into life paths that postpone or disincentivize starting and growing families, fertility rates will rise.

Education policy offers two prime examples of how government programs suppress fertility rates. People are more likely to have children if they start having families earlier and if they have religious convictions that make them think differently about the costs and benefits of raising children. Yet current education policies push people to delay having families until they are much older and impose barriers to accessing religious education, both of which significantly reduce fertility rates.

Higher Education Policies and Fertility Rates

U.S. higher education policies provide enormous incentives for more people to attend universities, take longer to complete their degrees, select degrees with negative returns on investment, and pursue advanced degrees at much higher rates than if we did not have such programs. In particular, highly subsidized student loans encourage more people to enroll and remain in higher education longer than they would if they fully bore the cost of their schooling.

The Grad Plus program, which offers unlimited loan amounts for graduate school, induces more people to remain even longer in school for graduate degrees. And government occupation licensing with ever-expanding educational requirements push people to take these loans and remain in school for many years.

That has created an artificially extended adolescence for the bulk of American young people. They 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.

Alexander Hamilton was 22 when he became George Washington’s aide-de-camp and helped direct the war of independence. Albert Einstein was 26 when he published a paper on his special theory of relativity. Yet we deem our 20-somethings unqualified to do much of anything and expect them to remain in school for years, accumulating credentials with the help of government subsidies before we let them tackle real adult responsibilities.

Extended Adolescence Reduces Fertility

The effect of this greatly extended adolescence is reduced fertility. In 2021, the median age of women in the United States who have a child for the first time was 27.3, up from 21.4 in 1970. The median age of men when they first become fathers is also increasing, as is the average age at which people get married.

In 1960, the median age for first marriage was 20.3 for women and 22.8 for men. By 2022, the median age for first marriage had risen to 28.6 for women and 30.5 for men. Much of that increase has come during the past decade, with the median age of first marriage increasing more than two years for women, up from 26.5, and nearly two years for men, up from 28.7.

This delayed start to family formation is largely driven by people spending much longer in school. Among women with a post-secondary degree who have children, 42.9 percent have their first child when they are 30 or older. Among women with only a high-school degree who have children, only 8.5 percent wait until they are older than 30 to have their first child. Among women with a bachelor’s or higher degree, nearly twice as many (21.8 percent) will never have children, compared to who ended their formal education with a high-school diploma (11.5 percent).

Obviously, higher education can have significant economic and social benefits. But it does not follow that we should push everyone to go to university and remain in school indefinitely. There are diminishing returns to education. Ever-expanding educational attainment—often the result of government credentialing requirements—comes at the expense of fertility.

Good things can become bad when pursued in excess. Believing that government subsidies for higher education have induced harmful over-consumption of schooling is no more against higher education than fighting obesity is against caloric intake.

Religion and Fertility

Education policy also suppresses fertility by discouraging parents from choosing religious education in K-12 schools. Children who receive a religious education are more likely to hold stronger religious beliefs when they grow up. And adults who are more strongly attached to religion tend to have many more children.

But in most states, tax dollars can only be used to support a secular public education. If parents wish to provide a religious education to their children, they have to pay private tuition for that in addition to paying taxes for a secular public education they are not using. This extra financial burden on those who prefer religious education pushes many to remain in secular schools, artificially reducing the religiosity of future generations.

Public policy that discourages religious education suppresses fertility rates because religious people tend to have more children. Among people who attend religious services at least once per week, fertility rates show no evidence of a long-term decline, fluctuating between two and 2.4 children per woman since 1982.

Among the non-religious, however, fertility rates are significantly lower, and the proportion of Americans who do not engage in any weekly religious activity has been growing dramatically. According to Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies, these two factors—low fertility rates among the non-religious and their growing share of the population—account for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.”

Religious belief appears to encourage fertility by altering the cost-benefit calculations of having children. Religious people see stronger benefits in having children and are less bothered by its expense, allowing religious parents more easily to redirect their limited funds away from other types of consumption and toward larger families.

If we empowered parents to direct public funds for K-12 education so they could choose equally among secular and religious options, many more would choose religious schools, increasing the religiosity of the next generation. That would raise future fertility rates.

The Stop-Digging Approach to Family Policy

Government policies to promote fertility don’t have to mean paying families to have more children. It is much cheaper and much more likely to be effective to alter or discontinue existing government policies that unintentionally push people into paths in their lives that make having children less likely.

Just as the best way to stop getting deeper in a hole is to stop digging, the best way to promote fertility is to stop the government programs that discourage having babies. The first two policies we could discontinue are those that push people to remain in school longer than they otherwise would and those that burden religious beliefs that make having babies more likely.