c/o Heritage Foundation
The Heritage Foundation, infamous for their role masterminding Project 2025, is a prominent conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., and a key driving force behind much of the right-wing agenda that defines conservative politics today. Examples of their policy prescriptions include limiting access to abortion and birth control, ignoring climate change concerns, and opposing legal protections on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, among others. This leads me to an article published by the Heritage Foundation in November 2024 titled “Education Policy Reforms Are Key Strategies for Increasing the Married Birth Rate,” authored by Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke.
The article nonsensically ties religiosity and fertility rates together, claiming that those who are more religious tend to have more children, while those who aren’t religious don’t have as many, or don’t have any at all. The article quotes Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies, claiming that “low fertility rates among the non-religious and their growing share of the population” account for “virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019.” While it is true that some religions, especially some denominations of Christianity, encourage members to have children, non-religious people cannot be entirely to blame for decreasing fertility rates.
There isn’t one singular, unified reason why people are deciding to not have kids, and it is not possible for one group in the United States to be solely responsible for the entire declining birth rate. According to the American Psychological Association, there are a myriad of rationales for why individuals are either pushing off having children or deciding not to have them at all. This includes the current social, political, and economic landscape, threats of climate change, and lack of systemic support. Furthermore, while the Heritage Foundation doesn’t specify what religion they are speaking to when claiming that religious people tend to have more children, it is pretty obviously directed to Christianity, as many of their policies are geared towards the political views of Christian nationalists.
The next section expands on the foundation’s political views, advocating the creation of policies designed to increase access to private religious education, with the goal of making it as accessible as public secular education. The article claims that expanding “[e]ducation savings accounts, tax-credit-supported private school scholarships, and vouchers” will make these types of schools more available as a choice for families. The Heritage Foundation claims that by promoting religious education, religious beliefs will fuel an increase in marriage and fertility in the United States.
The problem with this is that the Heritage Foundation’s plan to put private, religious schools on the same plane as public schools would threaten to transgress the First Amendment’s intended separation of church and state.
In the following section of the article, the authors make the claim that the pursuit of higher education (university, grad school, etc.) delays family formation. While this is generally true, as most individuals wait to have kids until after they have completed their education, Greene and Burke blame the federal government for this delay. They posit that federal subsidies and funding which allow for many middle-class and low-income individuals to afford schooling are the problem because they encourage further education post-university, such as masters and grad school programs.
Keep in mind that according to the Education Data Initiative, around 62% of all high schoolers end up enrolling in undergraduate programs, meaning that the majority of individuals graduating from high school pursue a college education, showcasing a broad desire to go to university and a need for federal subsidies. Moreover, 17.13% of postsecondary students are enrolled in graduate programs, far from the majority of college graduates, so this cannot possibly be the factor that is preventing people from having children. However, the Heritage Foundation clearly disagrees. Their most prominent suggestions are for the U.S. to, first, adopt universal school choice, pushing an agenda that promotes a certain lifestyle with an emphasis on having children; second, curtail federal higher education subsidies by eliminating grad PLUS loans; and third, end student loan debt cancellation.
First of all, universal school choice is already a controversial model, because it would allow for private schools, including religious schools, to take public tax dollars while being able to reject certain students. While public schools must accept every child in a district, private schools are under no such obligation. Second, limiting federal higher education subsidies will only hurt lower- and middle-class families, for whom these funds are necessary in order to continue their education tracks. Again, only about 17.3% of college students go on to graduate school, so eliminating PLUS loans is not only unnecessary but also detrimental to those who do want to pursue higher education.
Lastly, the Foundation also suggests ending student loan cancellation, because, as they write, “[i]t is expensive, regressive, and unfair to those who repaid their loans…. Moreover, debt amnesty further encourages young Americans to enroll in college or graduate school, confident that debt cancellation history will repeat itself….” This completely ignores the fact that, according to the Education Data Initiative, the average student is saddled with $41,520 in combined public and private loan debt and, despite some cancellation initiatives, the overall student loan debt in the U.S. is still almost $1.7 trillion. In the eyes of the Heritage Foundation, they could have stayed home, gotten a job, gotten married, and had kids instead of going into higher education.
While some (like the Heritage Foundation) may point to student debt as another reason to not pursue higher education, the real issue here is that the price we are paying for it in the United States is much too high. We shouldn’t be putting people under economic duress for attempting to receive an education that has a high potential to help them in the future. Plus, wouldn’t canceling debt encourage people to have children, especially if the main issue is finances? No debt could mean an opportunity to have kids, while also receiving an education beforehand, and not choosing between one or the other.
All in all, instead of more comprehensively addressing the problems that actually prevent Americans from having children, such as economic hardships, climate change, or even just the societal burdens and pressures that come along with childbirth, the Heritage Foundation proposes a plan that is not-so-subtlety laced with their own bias to push their overall conservative and religious agenda.
Julia Podgorski is a member of the class of 2028 and can be reached at jpodgorski@wesleyan.edu