Your best friend's mom ...

[barnhart]

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.

[Southerner]

Fremont, CA is listed as the happiest city in the US. Fremont-ers are highly educated and have low divorce rates, they have high incomes, and the area has many nature parks and a beautiful climate.

[Southerner]

So I'm guessing the answer you chose not to give is that: No, your Ivy League educated doctor friend doesn't actually regret going to college. And doesn't actually wish that he/she entered the blue collar workforce at age 18 and started to have babies.

It is a very sensitive and painful thing to go through, experiencing infertility esp. when the reason given by doctors is your age. I do not try to ask painful questions to score political points.

All I can say is that there are a lot of general regrets, and now acceptance of the situation.

Have you known someone experiencing a lot of anguish about infertility particularly due to age and delaying having children?

A couple can adopt a child.

[JohnH]

So I'm guessing the answer you chose not to give is that: No, your Ivy League educated doctor friend doesn't actually regret going to college. And doesn't actually wish that he/she entered the blue collar workforce at age 18 and started to have babies.

It is a very sensitive and painful thing to go through, experiencing infertility esp. when the reason given by doctors is your age. I do not try to ask painful questions to score political points.

All I can say is that there are a lot of general regrets, and now acceptance of the situation.

Have you known someone experiencing a lot of anguish about infertility particularly due to age and delaying having children?

A couple can adopt a child.

Which has nothing at all to do with pain of infertility, particularly when a doctor tells you it’s due to maternal age.

[Southerner]

It is a very sensitive and painful thing to go through, experiencing infertility esp. when the reason given by doctors is your age. I do not try to ask painful questions to score political points.

All I can say is that there are a lot of general regrets, and now acceptance of the situation.

Have you known someone experiencing a lot of anguish about infertility particularly due to age and delaying having children?

A couple can adopt a child.

Which has nothing at all to do with pain of infertility, particularly when a doctor tells you it’s due to maternal age.

Adoption can soften the pain of infertility.

[JohnH]

Adoption can soften the pain of infertility.

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

There are a lot of challenges to adoption, and I think adopting children AFTER years of trying other means can have a negative effect on the adopted child: in a sense, they weren't really wanted, but were rather a "last resort" after all else failed. I think people adopting children need to be extra careful to do so in a manner that makes the children very much feel like they were wanted.

I have laid plans to adopt children after my own are grown up or at least in their teens. It will take years of planning. I am not sure if we will aim for special needs or not (for example). We are talking about how we would like to do it. We may choose to just do foster care and then see if one of the foster kids ends up needing to be adopted, and be open to that. But my #1 priority is making sure any children we do adopt, know that we had been planning and thinking about them for 10 - 20 years and that they were very much wanted by us.

[Southerner]

Adoption can soften the pain of infertility.

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

There are a lot of challenges to adoption, and I think adopting children AFTER years of trying other means can have a negative effect on the adopted child: in a sense, they weren't really wanted, but were rather a "last resort" after all else failed. I think people adopting children need to be extra careful to do so in a manner that makes the children very much feel like they were wanted.

I have laid plans to adopt children after my own are grown up or at least in their teens. It will take years of planning. I am not sure if we will aim for special needs or not (for example). We are talking about how we would like to do it. We may choose to just do foster care and then see if one of the foster kids ends up needing to be adopted, and be open to that. But my #1 priority is making sure any children we do adopt, know that we had been planning and thinking about them for 10 - 20 years and that they were very much wanted by us.

For me, the entire discussion is laughable. I have relatives with advanced college degrees who have 4-6 children. I also have an aunt who married in her mid 30's and has 10 children. I also know of couples who could not have children and they adopted children and are quite happy. Look at Amy Comey Barrett, highly educated, 5 children and she adopted 2 Haitian children.

[JohnH]

For me, the entire discussion is laughable. I have relatives with advanced college degrees who have 4-6 children.

Which has nothing to do with the topic, since it is about sociological observations, not your own personal life.

I also have an aunt who married in her mid 30's and has 10 children.

Which is a highly unusual outcome. People who delay having children typically have fewer children, if any.

[Southerner]

For me, the entire discussion is laughable. I have relatives with advanced college degrees who have 4-6 children.

Which has nothing to do with the topic, since it is about sociological observations, not your own personal life.

Yes, my personal life informs my sociological observations.

[Ken]

The actual facts haven’t changed:

1. College-educated people have fewer children than non-college-educated do.

As we discussed upstream. This is only true if you are counting the 40% of children born to single mothers. Who are mostly non-college educated. If you are counting children born to stable 2-parent married families then it is not true.

We have to be careful not to assume a college educated person is smarter or wiser then one who is not. Education does not equal intelligence or wisdom.

When I have a broken car, leaking pipe, or electrical issue, I do not look for a college educated person. I need those things more often then I need to learn about French Poetry or Gender Studies. When I need a doctor, I do look for one. It has its place, but not everyone who paid to pay in college is smarter than those who work for a living with their hands.

I am not saying that at all.

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.

So if you simply measure total numbers of births by education status then the statistics will tell you that non-college educated women are having more children than college educated women. That is what the blog post cited by JohnH shows. But that is only the case if you count all those unwed single mothers, few of whom are college educated. If you narrow the question down to birth rates among stable 2-parent families then there is little difference between the college educated and non-college educated. In fact college educated women are slightly more likely to have children than non-college educated women.