# Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 6, 2025, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655 "2025-01-06T20:41:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 34
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/661 "2025-04-21T01:51:52Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Our beastly system produces far more college dropouts than it does college graduates. No, it’s a little less than one-third: > **[College Dropout Rates Statistics 2025 — By Majors](https://missiongraduatenm.org/college-dropout-statistics/)** > > 32.9% of college students drop out each year. Learn detailed college dropout statistics by major with our latest data. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 9:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/662 "2025-04-21T09:22:16Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > No, look at this chart: I think we are talking about two different things: men Vs women currently attending or graduating college, and the number of each in the total population with a degree. Changes in the latter are bound to lag changes in the former, which I think was @LSLGuy’s point. > [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > No, it’s a little less than one-third: Still very high considering the cost. There’s some merit to the idea that colleges should be on the hook for student loans, as this would incentivise them to make sure the education they offer benefits all their students. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 11:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/663 "2025-04-21T11:56:10Z")
Far more than that, it would incentivize them to not accept students who had any strikes against them. IOW, turn college back into the finishing school for the elites it once was. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Mouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mighty_mouse/32/7776_2.png) [@Mighty\_Mouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Mouse)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/664 "2025-04-21T12:00:04Z")
What we need is for students to be able to put up a bond for $250k before they are admitted. Make sure they have the financial wherewithal to finish college. That should fix most of the dropout “problem”. ---
**Author:** ![Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b77776/32.png) [@Paul\_was\_in\_Saudi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Paul_was_in_Saudi)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/665 "2025-04-21T14:32:02Z")
[White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/baby-bonuses-fertility-planning-trump-aides-assess-ideas-to-boost-birthrate.html) –From today’s _Times_ ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/666 "2025-04-21T14:38:21Z")
Well, there’s persuade and there’s “persuade”. I have no doubt they’ll talk a smidgen about the former but anything they implement will be the latter. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/667 "2025-04-21T15:09:18Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > > [@LSLGuy](#): > > > > Our beastly system produces far more college dropouts than it does college graduates. > > No, it’s a little less than one-third: > > [College Dropout Rates Statistics 2025 — By Majors](https://missiongraduatenm.org/college-dropout-statistics/) From your cite, looking at states with the most dropouts, California produces over 6 million college dropout per year, and the next nine states each produce over 1 million per year. So let’s call that 15 million dropouts per year in the U.S. as a low-ball estimate. Another cite, > **[College Graduation Statistics \[2023\]: Total Graduates per Year](https://educationdata.org/number-of-college-graduates)** > > Find college graduation statistics, including the annual number of college graduates by state, degree, discipline, and demographics. Tells us that about 2 million people earn bachelor degrees per year, and about 1 million earn associate degrees. So let’s call that 3 million college graduates produced per year. If my math is correct 15 million is much greater than 3 million, which supports the statement “our education system produces far more college dropouts than it does college graduates”. This makes sense even when looking at from a very simple view. If students graduate from college in four years, one fourth graduate per year. One fourth is less than the one third drop out, so there must be more dropping out than graduating. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/668 "2025-04-21T15:23:02Z")
The closest I can find to a discussion of what percentage of American college graduates is in this Wikipedia entry. It’s not true that there was any time in the 20th century that there was hardly any female American college graduates. In the late 19th century, there was a significant number of female American college graduates. It wouldn’t seem like a big number now, but that’s because because there weren’t very many male college graduates. In the 19th century, very few people even thought about going to college. Since the late 19th century, the number of college graduates has been increasing steadily. The proportion that are female has been increasing since the late 19th century. There was no sudden jump at any point: > **[Women's education in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_education_in_the_United_States)** > > In the early colonial history of the United States, higher education was designed for men only. Since the 1800s, women's positions and opportunities in the educational sphere have increased. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, women have surpassed men in number of bachelor's degrees and master's degrees conferred annually in the United States and women have continuously been the growing majority ever since, with men comprising a continuously lower minority in earning either degree. Since th... ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/669 "2025-04-21T15:35:13Z")
With regards to having children, I’m not sure the dropout rate really matters. What probably matters most to people contemplating having children is how to come up with the money to pay for their children to go to college. I’m sure that tuition cost factors into whether some people decide to have children in the first place, as well as whether to keep having children. If someone doubts they’ll be able to scrape together enough to fund one degree, they may decide against having children in the first place. And even if they have children, the daunting cost of having to save for multiple college tuitions will temper the desire to have lots of children. If there were more viable ways to have low- or no-cost college options, that would help remove the worry about tuition cost when people are deciding about having children. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/670 "2025-04-21T15:38:51Z")
According to this website, 62.2% of Americans who start college eventually graduate. Note, this is eventually graduate. It’s very common among Americans to “drop out” one or more times during their college career. What their doing is taking one or more years off. Sometimes this is because they have run out of money. They go to work to earn some money to go back to college. They may just be bored with college in general or with what they were studying. Most eventually go back to college: > **[College Graduation Rates: Full Statistics | BestColleges](https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-graduation-rates/)** > > Less than half of college students graduate in the "normal" timeframe. Find the new normal and more graduation statistics in our report. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/671 "2025-04-21T15:44:32Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Far more than that, it would incentivize them to not accept students who had any strikes against them. IOW, turn college back into the finishing school for the elites it once was. We don’t want that. But encouraging marginal students to apply and take out huge loans when they have a high chance of dropping out is also bad. * * * > [@filmore](#): > > If there were more viable ways to have low- or no-cost college options, that would help remove the worry about tuition cost when people are deciding about having children. Send fewer people to college and/or for fewer years, and it will be easier to fund. Most jobs that require college degrees don’t really, they’re just using it as a filter to find employees who are sufficiently smart and conscientious to complete one. We should be able to find a way to signal these traits without young people starting out in life with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/672 "2025-04-21T16:11:08Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > Send fewer people to college and/or for fewer years, and it will be easier to fund. Most jobs that require college degrees don’t really, they’re just using it as a filter to find employees who are sufficiently smart and conscientious to complete one. We should be able to find a way to signal these traits without young people starting out in life with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. We had a way to do that; it involved having rigorous academic standards _in high school_, and a system where not everyone got a high school diploma, or was expected to get one. For better or for worse, that’s not the system we have now, and it isn’t socially or politically feasible to go back to it, since no state or district wants to see their graduation rate go _down_, and in any case people between the ages of sixteen and eighteen need something to do other than getting into trouble, and we’ve reached a widespread social consensus that school ought to be that thing. I agree that the current system, where college is used as the main filter for employment and students start to be held to serious academic standards at the _same time_ they start paying tuition, is a problem. However, it’s worth noting that community colleges are very cheap, and sometimes even free, depending on where you’re located, so there are ways to get a couple of years of further education and figure out whether you want more of it without ending up with tends of thousands of dollars of debt. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/673 "2025-04-21T16:27:04Z")
> [@Fretful\_Porpentine](#): > > rigorous academic standards _in high school_ Is there any statistics online which show definitively that the academic standards in American high schools have increased? This would have to show since when this has been happening. It would have to show by how much the standards have increased. It would have to show that there is any such thing as an objective measurement of academic standards. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/674 "2025-04-21T16:36:07Z")
He said we _used to have_ rigorous standards for graduating high school. So perhaps you’re looking for the opposite? ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/675 "2025-04-21T17:28:04Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > There were exceptions for dorms. And yes, it _did_ discourage young women who just got their first job. They were expected to live with their parents or their husband. There were also women’s boarding houses (or just renting a spare room from a respectable widow or spinster). A more upmarket option wad a residential hotel for women like the Barbizon. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/676 "2025-04-21T17:49:05Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > So perhaps you’re looking for the opposite? First, I apologize for using “increased” when I meant to use “increased or decreased”. This is typical for me. I write my posts too fast. I then mess them up making them hard to understand. In fact, I messed up the first draft of this post and had to go back and fix it. I’m not looking for either the standards to have decreased or increased. I genuinely don’t know. I don’t know of any online statistics which talks objectively about the standards. ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/677 "2025-04-21T17:51:48Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Is there any statistics online which show definitively that the academic standards in American high schools have increased? This would have to show since when this has been happening. It would have to show by how much the standards have increased. It would have to show that there is any such thing as an objective measurement of academic standards. I said they’ve decreased, not increased. No, I can’t prove for sure that the standards have changed, but the [high school graduation rate](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/) in the US has more than doubled over time, and the current _college_ graduation rate is only slightly below where the HS graduation rate was in 1960. If you restricted your hiring to “only high school graduates” back then, your hiring pool would consist of roughly the top 40% of the population by educational attainment; restricting it to college students now achieves roughly the same thing. This is obviously an imperfect filter for whether someone would make a good employee – people drop out of the formal educational system all the time for economic and other reasons that have nothing to do with their ability to do a job – but it’s an _easy_ filter to put into place, and it feels objective. And rightly or wrongly, employers do seem to feel like they need some sort of filter that narrows their pool of applicants considerably. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/678 "2025-04-21T18:05:59Z")
> [@Fretful\_Porpentine](#): > > I said they’ve decreased, not increased. As I said in the post just above this, I screwed up. I meant to write “decreased or increased”. I wrote the post too fast (as I often do) and wrote “increased” instead. Sorry about that. The fact that the high school graduation rate has more than doubled could mean that the standards have decreased or it could mean that we’re teaching the students better. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/679 "2025-04-21T18:06:00Z")
Interesting article. Obviously few of us are optimistic that the possible carrots will do much. Some of them are quite ironic. Possibly “would reserve 30 percent of scholarships for the Fulbright program, the prestigious, government-backed international fellowship, for applicants who are married or have children.” [This Fulbright?](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2025/04/16/proposed-budget-cuts-could-end-fulbright-program#:~:text=That's%20%2427%20billion%2C%20or%2048,other%20educational%20and%20cultural%20programs.) > The proposed budget cuts would terminate the Fulbright scholarship, a highly selective cultural exchange program established by Congress in 1946, along with the State Department’s other educational and cultural programs. Funding to make IVF more affordable? As noted in the article actions have been “this month, the health department [made large cuts](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/health/cdc-layoffs-kennedy.html) to Division of Reproductive Health, which handled issues related to in vitro fertilization and maternal health outcomes” “The “newest and boldest” idea, Mr. Richards said, is a policy plan that offers tax credits to married couples with children, in which families receive more money back from the government for each additional child they have.” Okay requiring marriage is new and very 50s ish but the basic idea is the child tax credit. Not all that _new_. ---
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2025, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655/680 "2025-04-21T18:27:30Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > The fact that the high school graduation rate has more than doubled could mean that the standards have decreased or it could mean that we’re teaching the students better. That’s certainly possible, although it does look like the gains over time, particularly in reading, have been [modest](https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/) and mostly wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic. (Stats are for 8th grade because for some reason, I couldn’t easily find any for HS seniors covering the full 1970s-to-present time range; it’s possible that they haven’t been tracking them for as long.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655.md?page=33) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-any-practical-way-to-increase-the-birthrate/1012655.md?page=35)