Your best friend's mom ...

[JohnH]

Why do you keep bringing up marital status?

The question is birth rates of non college educated vs college educated. Non college educated is higher. Marital status is irrelevant.

If you’d like to study how to make marriage rates higher then study religious populations like Mormons, Hasidic Jews, plain Mennonites and so forth.

[ohio jones]

Which has nothing at all to do with ...

It also has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Which has nothing to do with the topic ...

Why do you keep bringing up marital status?

The question is...

Reminder:

Don't try to define the content of someone else's thread with statements like "what we are talking about is..."

[Bootstrap]

FWIW, when I started this thread, I thought the topic at hand was the influence of your best friend's mother on you, and what that means when we think about who our children associate with.

[Ken]

Ken, I would feel more comfortable with your analysis if I could swap the phrase "college educated" for "well connected to the economy." There are ways, especially in specific economic zones, to be reliably established in the economic system without higher education. Otherwise I think you're right, stable marriage and family are rapidly becoming a luxury of the upper and upper middle classes.

I'm only using it because college education was the subject of this thread and all the data on things like income and birth rates is sorted by education status. Not some more vague notion of how well connected someone is to the economy.

But this isn't just an economic question. There is an enormous social aspect as well. JohnH points to high marriage rates and low divorce rates among the Amish. That isn't because the Amish are especially wealthy. Although many are arguably middle class. It is because they are members of a tight knit society with lots of connections.

In the non-Amish world where the other 99.9% of America lives, college provides some of those same societal connections. Many if not most colleges require freshman and sometimes sophomores to live on campus in dorms where they have endless social engagement. Meals are in communal dining halls with lots of others. You attend classes and labs and study groups every day. There are endless parties, clubs, and social events. So your chances of meeting other like-minded potential mates is vastly higher at college than if you enter the workforce at age 18 and are working in construction or a factory or some such. And those connections and social networks extend past graduation through alumni groups and friend circles. My wife is still on big group chats and periodic zooms with her big friend circle that she went to school with 30 years ago. This is one of the reasons why Mennonites and other denominations built their own colleges in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Now one could argue that church can provide some of these same social opportunities and connections. And it certainly does, especially for groups like the Amish and conservative Mennonites. And big mega-churches make a big effort to do so as well with their social activities. But if we are talking about the population writ-large then church is only one possible way to mirror what goes on at college. Other ways are things like social clubs (Elks, Rotary, Shriners, VFW, etc.) and activities like bowling leagues, softball leagues, and so forth. But all of those things (including church attendance) that would provide social connection outside of college have been declining in America since the 1950s. College is the one exception to those trends. College attendance rates have been rising while every other form of social connection seems to be falling.

None of this is to make value judgments about college versus work. It is simply a partial explanation for why marriage rates are stable for college educated but falling for the non-college educated. The other part of the equation is, of course, economics.

[Robert]

What I am saying is that we have a real problem with unwed mothers in this country. I think the latest statistics are that about 40% of children in the US are now born out of wedlock to single mothers. 40%. And all those single mothers having children out of wedlock tilt heavily towards young, poor, and uneducated. Often they are HS dropouts and basically wards of the state vis a vis Medicaid and other forms of welfare.

Many are on welfare and have trouble getting off social services. I would agree that one of the biggest issues in the US culture is absentee fathers.

[Ken]

Why do you keep bringing up marital status?

The question is birth rates of non college educated vs college educated. Non college educated is higher. Marital status is irrelevant.

Marital status is irrelevant to the question of successful child rearing? Really?

Remind me. Are you the same person who not long ago on this forum advocated using the power of the state to actually punish people who choose to have children out of wedlock? Marital status didn't seem so irrelevant to you then.

We could run the non-college educated birth rates even higher in this country if we started paying young unwed mothers even more to have children. And provide them with more benefits and encouragement to have children. Would that be a good thing?

[JohnH]

Ken, I would feel more comfortable with your analysis if I could swap the phrase "college educated" for "well connected to the economy." There are ways, especially in specific economic zones, to be reliably established in the economic system without higher education. Otherwise I think you're right, stable marriage and family are rapidly becoming a luxury of the upper and upper middle classes.

I'm only using it because college education was the subject of this thread and all the data on things like income and birth rates is sorted by education status. Not some more vague notion of how well connected someone is to the economy.

But this isn't just an economic question. There is an enormous social aspect as well. JohnH points to high marriage rates and low divorce rates among the Amish. That isn't because the Amish are especially wealthy. Although many are arguably middle class. It is because they are members of a tight knit society with lots of connections.

In the non-Amish world that the other 99.9% of America lives in, college provides some of those same societal connections. Many if not most colleges require freshman and sometimes sophomores to live on campus in dorms where they have endless social engagement. Meals are in communal dining halls with lots of others. You attend classes and labs and study groups every day. There are endless parties, clubs, and social events. So your chances of meeting other like-minded potential mates is vastly higher than you enter the workforce at age 18 and are working in construction or a factory or some such. And those connections and social networks extend past graduation through alumni groups and friend circles. My wife is still on big group chats and periodic zooms with her big friend circle that she went to school with 30 years ago.

Now one could argue that church can provide some of these same social opportunities and connections. And it certainly does, especially for groups like the Amish and conservative Mennonites. And big mega-churches make a big effort to do so as well with their social activities. But if we are talking about the population writ-large then church is only one possible way to mirror what goes on at college. Other ways are things like social clubs (Elks, Rotary, Shriners, VFW, etc.) and activities like bowling leagues, softball leagues, and so forth. But all of those things (including church attendance) that would provide social connection outside of college have been declining in America since the 1950s. College is the exception to those trends. College attendance rates have been rising while every other form of social connection seems to be falling.

None of this is to make value judgments about college versus work. It is simply a partial explanation for why marriage rates are stable for college educated but falling for the non-college educated. The other part of the equation is, of course, economics.

People don’t go to college until 18/19 or later. The values that cause plain societies to flourish begin at a much younger age than that. Many are already married by age 18 or 19.

You also claimed college is the exception to those trends. I feel you may be out of touch with changes in colleges in the present era. There is much less social contact particularly between guys and girls.

[JohnH]

Why do you keep bringing up marital status?

The question is birth rates of non college educated vs college educated. Non college educated is higher. Marital status is irrelevant.

Marital status is irrelevant to the question of successful child rearing? Really?

Remind me. Are you the same person who not long ago on this forum advocated using the power of the state to actually punish people who choose to have children out of wedlock? Marital status didn't seem so irrelevant to you then.

We could run the non-college educated birth rates even higher in this country if we started paying young unwed mothers even more to have children. And provide them with more benefits and encouragement to have children. Would that be a good thing?

It’s irrelevant to comparing statistics about the effect of college education or not on birth rates.

If anything, the fact that being a single mother is difficult and government support isn’t that great for it - yet more end up having kids than college educated women who supposedly have more marriage support, better careers etc is worthy of study.

[Ken]

You also claimed college is the exception to those trends. I feel you may be out of touch with changes in colleges in the present era. There is much less social contact particularly between guys and girls.

College ATTENDANCE is the exception to those trends. Engagement in community clubs like the Elks and Rotary, church attendance, bowling leagues, etc. have all been falling since the 1950s. All ways that non-college educated young people used to find social engagement and meet people. The one thing that has been rising since the 1950s is college attendance.

I also think I know what college is like today. I have two daughters who are currently in college and a third who graduated in 2020. I talk to them all the time about how their lives are going. One was in a sorority, one was in the marching band, and the youngest is in journalism writing for the school newspaper. All those things provided lots of social interaction with the opposite sex. I also know a lot of their friends because they pass through our house which functions as a waystation for all our daughters' college friends. My oldest started a wedding video business in college and kept very busy filming weddings of her recently graduated circle of acquaintances until she tired of going to weddings and landed a more professional job.

I also teach a lot of HS students who are college bound and a lot who are not. I write dozens upon dozens of college recommendation letters so I know where they are going. And I keep track of how at least some of them are doing. Over the past several years I have visited at least 25 different college campuses on college visits and tours with my daughters. And I attended 4 different colleges myself, most recently in 2007.

Can you say any of that?

[R7ehr]

Little different subject, but I wonder how much the married/non-married, and college/non-college birth rates would look like if we could consider (a) birth control and (c) abortion.
Which group is merely using unnatural methods to mask and "fix" things?