Colleges Are Reaping the Anti-Natalist Whirlwind

A recent report from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) forecasts that this fall will be the last year of college-admissions bounty, with high-school graduates nationwide hitting their peak number of 3.9 million. Subsequent classes will shrink steadily, falling to 3.4 million by 2041. All but 12 states and the District of Columbia will see declining numbers of high-school students, with California and New York each losing nearly 30 percent over the next 15 years.

Higher-education leaders and policy wonks have fretted over this impending “demographic cliff” for years now, though seemingly without understanding the fundamental nature of the crisis. WICHE policy analyst Patrick Lane, the report’s coauthor, told Higher Ed Dive he is sure its projections will prove accurate, “because you can’t create 18-year-olds out of nothing. There just aren’t the bodies anymore.”

With no untapped demographic groups left to recruit from, further declines in average birthrates will cut deeply into higher ed. Pardon me, but you can make 18-year-olds out of nothing. That’s how they are all made; it just takes 19 years. You see, when a man loves a woman in a special way … well, you know the rest. Two decades later, they drive the fruit of their union to State U and begin making tuition payments.

Forgive my facetiousness. Of course, Dr. Lane and everyone else in higher-ed land knows where (former) babies come from. And higher education has survived despite steadily falling birthrates for decades. Live births in the United States peaked in 1957. Those Baby Boomers had passed through college by the late 1970s, but enrollments continued to grow as the rate of college attendance among high-school graduates increased. Only half of all high-school leavers attended college in 1975. Two decades later, nearly 70 percent did so.

The looming college-enrollment crisis is downstream of our society’s orientation away from marriage and childrearing. As a 2022 Vox article explains, in a de-industrializing nation colleges enjoyed a legal monopoly on the sale of “credentials that unlocked the gateway to a stable, prosperous life.” A generation later, though, Americans increasingly view four-year degrees as expensive luxuries with insufficient return on investment. With no untapped demographic groups left to recruit from, further declines in average birthrates will cut deeply into an industry already seeing institutional closures at a rate of one per week.

As Lane rightly observes, there are not readily available policy solutions to every problem. The looming college-enrollment crisis is an intractable consequence of demography. As such, it is downstream of our society’s orientation away from marriage and childrearing. The irony is that arguably no culture-making institutions have done more to reshape those attitudes than colleges and universities. Where are large families less welcome, or where do they seem more culturally transgressive, than on American campuses?

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, associate professor of economics at the Catholic University of America and mother to eight children, recently authored Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. She interviewed 55 women with at least five children, hoping to illuminate the causes of a declining birthrate by asking what motivates those who defy the general trend. Each of Pakaluk’s subjects is an exception, but none more so than her fellow academics. “Across academia,” she writes, “women with children are hard to find. […] Only 40 percent of female faculty are married with children” 12 years after completing their doctorate, “compared to 70 percent of their male colleagues.” Mikki, a mother of five, was “asked recently, in an elevator at the [California] university where she teaches, whether she was expecting her first.” Her answer elicited a surprised “You don’t look like someone who has five kids!” Mikki wondered, “What does that person look like? I’ve heard that several times. What is that comment about?”

What, indeed? This awkward elevator conversation was no trivial matter of differing personal preference. It points to profoundly diverging conceptions of the human person—an intellectual and cultural gulf now so vast that meaningful communication across it may be impossible. Richard B. Weaver’s seminal work Ideas Have Consequences warned in 1948 that “loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning.” Gradually, “as habit becomes implanted … apathy mounts [even] as the moral crisis deepens.” Eventually, individuals and civilizations alike “reach a state in which [their] entire moral orientation is lost.”

Weaver’s concerns were chiefly philosophical. He traced postmodern man’s moral relativism to William of Occam’s articulation of nominalism in opposition to Platonic idealism. With the nominalists, “logic became grammaticized, passing from a science … [of] ontological division by categories to a study of signification.” Weaver’s narrative may credit one 14th-century English philosopher with over-much influence, but his diagnosis feels more apt with each passing year. The intellectual Left’s philosopher par excellence, Michel Foucault, treated words as human constructs signifying only the desires of exploitative ruling hierarchies. Contrast three contemporary favorites of intellectual conservatives—Jordan Peterson, Iain McGilchrist, and David Bentley Hart—who all find in language compelling evidence that conscious mind is the irreducible and governing fact of the universe.

What environment could be more hostile to a moral teleology of selfhood than an elite graduate school? But what does this have to do with demography and college enrollment? Variants of metaphysical nominalism, Weaver claims, imagine man as a kind of seed with a nature ultimately determined from within, “so that his flowering needs a kind of liberty that is a ‘freedom from’”—from tradition, hierarchy, or any external norms of selfhood. This is the spirit of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s famous dictum, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

The modern campus celebrates every kind of sexual expression except monogamous marital fecundity. In contrast, metaphysical idealism “rejects ‘freedom from’ in favor of freedom to.’” This dichotomy is perhaps clearest in our orientation toward work. For much of Western history, “it was held that behind each work there stood some conception of its perfect execution,” but “utilitarianism [teaches] that work is use and not worship.” Modernity “thinks not of subordinating self to end but of subordinating end to self.” There are no craftsmen in such a moral metaphysic, only the tawdry monotony of producer and consumer—the imposition of will and desire upon brute nature.

Pakaluk’s study participant Mikki encountered the tension between these mutually exclusive visions of selfhood in her Ivy League M.A. program, when she and her lapsed-Catholic then-boyfriend began discussing marriage and children. “He grew up with a worldview he couldn’t shake,” as she put it. “He had a certain idea of what sex was, how fertility worked, and what it means to be [married].” What environment could be more hostile to such a moral teleology of selfhood than an elite graduate school? Mikki felt isolated, knowing “there were very few people to talk to who wouldn’t perceive [my husband], if I complained about it, as crazy or oppressive.” These conversations drove the couple closer together and toward religious practice. Mikki found that Catholicism fulfilled “a need for something intellectually consistent … in ethical theory,” her academic field. More surprisingly, she found a natural resonance with her Japanese heritage. “[We] are … very hierarchically minded,” she explained, “so the Church hierarchy was no problem for me.” This cultural intuition helped Mikki to accept Catholic doctrine on the natural hierarchy of Goods, which gradually increased her openness to life. “I never thought about being pregnant in my twenties,” she said. “But now, the more I experience it, the whole thing becomes mysterious each time. […] I still cannot believe that you can make people with your body.”

Indeed. Future 18-year-olds, made from nothing! What Mikki learned and her husband rediscovered is the fulfilling purpose of a selfhood that subordinates means to ends—one that finds those ends in a superintending metaphysical order, not an imagined autonomy of the will. This is a thoroughgoing repudiation of campus culture’s regnant ethos. Look up an undergraduate arts-and-science college’s mission statement. You will find references to self-discovery, identity, and individual attainment of achievement and status. There will be nothing of piety, obligation, or the tutelary discipline of telos. The modern campus celebrates every kind of sexual expression except monogamous marital fecundity. The culture-making power of higher education is far from bearing sole blame for plummeting U.S. birthrates, but colleges and universities have contributed mightily to the culture shifts that partly underlie this trend. The worldview they typically impart is a powerful inhibitor to those notions of personhood that alone can reverse our demographic decline.

If higher-education leaders dread the coming demographic cliff, they would do well to reflect that their institutions have pulled the walls of the temple down upon themselves. Weaver warned nearly 80 years ago that “no one can stand aside from a sweep as deep and broad as the decline of a civilization. […] There will be little joy in the hour when they can say, ‘I told you so.’”

None, in fact. Intellectual conservatives must also grieve for a culture currently willing its own destruction and for the closure of its once-vibrant institutions. But we did tell you so.

Samuel Negus is director of program review and accreditation at Hillsdale College.