Noted education writer and podcaster Jennifer Berkshire addresses the value of looking at the bigger Trumpworld picture when it comes to education.
The Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate doesn’t quite rank with rooting out “DEI,” tariff-ing, or expelling immigrants but it’s up there. In a recent interview, Elon Musk confessed that a fear of the shrinking number of babies keeps him up at night. What does this have to do with education? Everything. Last year, two of the big education ‘thinkers’ at Heritage released a guide to how changes in education policy could increase “the married birthrate”:
“Expensive and misguided government interventions in education are, whether intended or not, pushing young people away from getting married and starting families—to the long-term detriment of American society.”
What are those government interventions? Things like subsidizing student loans, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Or requiring teachers, who are mostly women, to have bachelor degrees, thereby encouraging young women to go to college. Of course there is a voucher angle—there always is with these folks. But the key here is that a chorus of influential Trump thinkers, like this guy, keeps telling us that there are too many women on campus, and that policy shifts could get them back into the home where they belong.
If the administration succeeds in privatizing the government-run Student Loan Program, college will become much more expensive, significantly shrinking the number of kids who’ll be able to attend. And that seems to be the point, as conservative activist Chris Rufo explained in an interview a few weeks ago.
“By spinning off, privatizing and then reforming the student loan programs, I think that you could put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession. And I think that would be a very salutary thing.”
So when you hear the rising chorus coming from Trump world that there are too many of the wrong people on the nation’s campuses, recall that an awful lot of these self-styled ‘nationalists’ believe this: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers.”