Strange Bedfellows

In which I am on the side of pronatalists

I don’t generally jump into the pronatalist discourse, though I enjoy the X posts by (mostly) men wondering how to make babies. But a few weeks ago, I was talking with my daughter about a young woman we know who is starting a family right after college, before grad school or career. My mother had four children before she was 30, after which she went back to school to get a graduate degree in engineering.

Why not start early? Even with hard fought policies like paid maternity and paternity leave, most women’s careers take a hit from taking time off in their thirties to have children. Starting in one’s twenties may be the better option.

Now, imagine a young woman, a senior at a public university in Florida or Texas or Tennessee deciding with her future spouse to start a family shortly after graduation. You know who would pay a steep price for that decision? Her alma mater. Florida’s public universities get performance funding only for graduates who, one year out, are either in graduate school or earning at least $40,000. Those “not found” in wage records, including new parents, drag down both the employment rate and the median wage.

In Tennessee, if you don’t show up on payroll data after graduation, your college’s share of next year’s appropriation will shrink accordingly.

In Texas, House Bill 8 adds a premium for credentials in officially designated “high-demand fields” ranked by ten-year job-growth projections. But any graduate who pauses to form a family earns their major no bonus at all.

Metrics don’t care why a recent college graduate doesn’t have a job. If you don’t, or aren’t going to graduate school right away, you’re not making your state’s higher education system look good.

Pronatalists might take note. There’s almost no attention to this particular perverse incentive of “outcomes based” university metrics. The only writing I’ve found on the subject of higher education and parenting at all is a 2015 blog post by Rayane Alamuddin, "Parenting as a College Outcome." There is also concern that student loans cause delayed marriage and family formation. Meanwhile state legislatures continue passing employment-based accountability metrics that don’t even consider taking time off to start a family.

The U.S. News & World Report college ranking methodology is also part of the problem, allocating 40% of rankings to “outcomes” including the vague “social mobility,” which implicitly penalizes colleges whose graduates delay income-generating employment.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) First-Destination Survey measures outcomes within six months of graduation in categories such as “employed full-time,” “continuing education,” and even “still seeking.” “Forming a family” is not a legitimate post-graduation path.

And my absurdist favorite, the Classification of Instructional Programs to Standard Occupational Classification (CIP-SOC) crosswalk, does not see family formation as a legitimate outcome of a university education. (It also doesn’t see any legitimate future for philosophy.)

The irony of course is that a college education provides enormous benefits for parenting and child development as well as civic health. The literature on this is vast.¹

But today, public higher ed outcomes metrics say loud and clear that raising children is not a legitimate way to use a college education. To be clear: my point is that an education should be for whatever purpose a graduate wants to put it to, and I’ll stand with the pronatalists to make this case.

In just the last few months, big stories in the Washington Post and NYTimes and on NPR (to name a few) have reported on the new Trump administration’s efforts to “persuade women to have more babies,” including potential “baby bonuses.” Here’s one: consider starting a family as a good outcome of a college education.

Fixes would be easy. Look at outcomes over 5-10 years instead of just six months. Explicitly count family formation as a positive outcome (though it would be hard to get the data). Value the idea of “first generation” students going on to make “second generation” students. Revise the CIP-SOC crosswalk to include family formation as a legitimate outcome category.

Why punish universities whose graduates want to use their education to better raise thoughtful children? Why should we reduce education's purpose solely to immediate economic outcomes rather than, say, over generations? What could be more important to our collective future than well-educated parents raising future citizens, innovators, and leaders? What could be more hypocritical than claiming to value family while voting for metrics that work against it?

I never expected to find myself making this argument but here we are. As someone who has been arguing that higher ed’s obsession with narrow performance metrics distorts the real value of a college education, I’ll take even the most unlikely of alliances.

The fundamental issue is what higher education is for. Is a college degree merely a job training certificate to produce immediate wage gains? Or is it also preparation for citizenship, parenthood, and a life well lived?

The metrics-obsessed approach to higher education accountability has created a system that works against values I share with my new strange bedfellows, that we need to be thinking much, much farther into the future.

1. The image is Otto Scholderer's Young Girl Reading (1883). See of course Mary Wollstonecraft. See also Catharine Beecher, Benjamin Rush, etc. Start with Republican motherhood, if you’re interested.