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.”
Trump has spent his second term following that advice. He has threatened funding for colleges and universities themselves over curricula he deems too “woke,” and his Department of Education has dismantled student loan repayment programs that made it easier for working- and middle-class borrowers to repay. This year, it plans to bring back wage garnishment if they fall behind. While those changes will affect almost every college student and student loan borrower, they will hurt women and Black and Southern students the most.
The right’s blatant attacks on higher education are intended to undermine “the gains and progress women have made in the economy,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for Protect Borrowers, a student debtors’ advocacy group. “All with the intention of bringing women back into the home.”
If that is the aim, the Trump administration has found the right target. Higher education has been an engine for women’s equality since it became more fully accessible during the rights revolutions of the 1970s, when women began enrolling in college in higher numbers than men; soon they became more likely to earn a degree. A host of cultural factors likely contributed to that shift, but the biggest is that between the birth-control pill and new anti-discrimination laws, it grew possible for women to go to college and hope for a career after in ways unattainable before. At least in theory.
Although women soon surpassed men on college campuses, men with bachelor’s degrees still outnumbered women with bachelor’s degrees in the labor force until 2019, according to federal data. Women made up more than half of the college-educated labor force from the pandemic to today—which is likely one of the reasons that, in recent years, conservatives have been wringing their hands about the loss of the traditional family.
Women are often breadwinners and heads of households. Women do well in academics and continue to work, because they have to and because they want to. Women are no longer compelled to stay home and raise children while career pursuits are left to men.
Commentators—typically but not always conservatives—have often portrayed this as a problem for, and a loss for, men. Young men are in crisis, and there’s a crisis of masculinity. Men suffer from a loneliness epidemic. Many liberals, most notably Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is also a front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination, have expressed as much concern about young men as conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk.
But this line of thinking ignores the reasons women pursue higher education in the first place: It’s the only way they have a chance at parity in the workplace. Without college, women are much less likely to work at all. Almost two-thirds of men over 25 with only high school educations are working, while less than half of women in the same age group with the same level of education are, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. For those with some college or an associate’s degree, just 56 percent of women are working, compared to 67 percent of men.
The median earnings of a man with only a high school education are 26 percent higher than those of a woman in the same bracket. That’s partly because many of the high-skilled, high-paying trades in fields like construction and manufacturing are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, and remain less friendly toward women who want to pursue them. Women tend to dominate in the pink-collar health, education, and administrative fields that typically pay less.
In fact, one of the recommendations from the Heritage Foundation was to remove the certification requirements for the women-dominated field of public school teaching, making it less likely that teachers could earn the wage premiums often associated with bachelor’s degrees and specialized certifications.
“Research has shown us for a very long time that higher education is a pathway to economic mobility,” especially for women, said Jennifer Turner, a senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “It’s been critically important for a very long time, especially for people that come from lower-income families, to help them achieve economic mobility that they wouldn’t necessarily have had the opportunity to achieve without education.”
Of course, even with college educations, women still struggle to gain equity in the workforce, where men still outearn them. The pay gap remains even higher for Black, Latina, and Native American women.
Women are much more likely to be burdened with student debt they struggle to repay; they hold two-thirds of the nation’s total student debt. That’s because women rely more than men on help paying for college, said Gloria Blackwell, chief executive officer of the American Association of University Women. Limiting financial aid and changing the rules will harm women first, especially women of color and those who are taking college classes with young children at home. “More women are parents and students at the same time than men, and more people of color are student parents as well,” she said. For those already stretched by the competing demands of school and parenthood, it matters even more “when the policies take away their ability to fund their education.”
That so many women are already parents by the time they begin pursuing education is one of the ironies of the Heritage Foundation’s position. “Almost a quarter of undergraduate students are parents already,” Turner said. “So it’s kind of like, why is there this idea that education is the problem?”
The answer is that it’s of a piece with the anti-feminist arguments—about women in the workforce being a problem for men and their children—that conservatives make elsewhere. In fact, the idea that women’s college attendance damages their fertility has persisted for more than a century, Blackwell said. But she also noted that “one of the first research reports that AAUW actually did was research on individuals who had received higher education, and it turned out that those women indeed were able to also have children.”
The Department of Education had said the first letters warning student borrowers in default—those more than nine months late on paying their loans—that they would see their wages garnished would go out in January. It temporarily delayed that plan late in the month, but it remains on the table. Many student borrowers may hear nothing else before their paychecks shrink. This is the first time garnishment has been threatened since before the Covid pandemic, and students who want to try to settle their accounts will have fewer options than they did under President Joe Biden, because the Trump administration has eliminated many of the programs intended to make repayment easier.
Borrowers most likely to be in default are the working- and middle-class Americans who have little room in their budgets. As of September, the Education Department warned that 5.3 million borrowers were in default. A survey by the Institute for College Access and Success found that 42 percent said they were making trade-offs between paying for their student loans and paying for necessities. Black women, especially, are disproportionately debt-burdened. “It feels like punishing the people that those programs were meant to serve,” Turner said. “We’re taking steps back as opposed to taking steps forward.”
Turner pointed out that defaults and garnishments will have a wider impact on local and national economies, as families can afford less and pull back on spending to be able to cover the basics. But there will be even longer-term damage if the administration succeeds in making it harder to access college in general, and harder to pay back student loans for those who do: Fewer women will be able to participate in the workforce. That will exacerbate the affordability crisis and have a bigger impact on fertility rates than women not attending college, Turner said. “A lot of people aren’t having as many children because children are expensive and they can’t afford childcare,” she said.
In the short term, Blackwell added, the changes to higher ed will mean fewer women will attend college at all and many more will struggle once they get there, especially as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are attacked. “Black and Latina women really need that sense of belonging,” she said. “If they don’t feel safe or supported, that could be the difference between their staying enrolled and dropping out.”
The result is that low-income students will be more likely to opt out of college altogether, making everyone less well-off and undermining the kind of economic security people feel they need before they get married and have children. “I think we’ll see a bifurcation in the economy,” said Canchola Bañez. “And an exacerbation of poverty and economic inequality.”
Of course, that may all be the point. The Heritage Foundation released another report early this year about “saving the American family,” which revived an argument that social safety net supports discourage marriage and should be ended. One of the first things Vice President JD Vance said in office was “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Instead of making it easier for women to choose to marry and have children, conservatives have focused on removing those choices—and many others.