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........

© New Republic