Women with a college education are having very few children, and the US economy is about to see a shortage in highly skilled workers because of it, warns Harvard economist David Ellwood in Harvard Magazine.
Demography is destiny, he says, and the numbers are quite stark. College graduates are putting off childbearing until their 30s and beyond, having on average 1.6 children. (some 27 percent of them at age 40 still haven't had children) Women who have never completed high school, by contrast, have an average 2.6 children and are less likely to be married than college women.
Women's wages tend to plateau after childbirth, the so-called "Mommy Penalty", so Ellwood posits that the career cost of children is steeper for the high-earning college educated mother and hardly a relative cost at all for low wage earners. The trend will leave us with a cohort of workers who did not have the intellectual and material benefit of well-educated parents.
The solution might be to look to well-educated immigrants or older workers, says Ellwood, but the longterm solution is to make work pay better. [Meanwhile our Senators today heeded the business lobby and voted down a proposal to raise the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25. A person working 40 hour weeks on minimum wage with no time off earns only about $1,000 more than the poverty level annually.]
"If we don't take seriously a much more thoughtful immigration policy, if we don't ask what we can do to make work pay for low-skill people -- so that they, too, might have a chance to postpone childbearing and form families -- if we don't think about what it's going to take to make the family tradeoff less costly for high-skill women," Ellwood says, then "the consequences will affect everything, perhaps even our sense of unity and community."
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