Proof Education Is Bad For You

Headline The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America

First-time mothers are older in big cities and on the coasts, and younger in rural areas and in the Great Plains and the South. In New York and San Francisco, their average age is 31 and 32. In Todd County, S.D., and Zapata County, Tex., it’s half a generation earlier, at 20 and 21, according to the analysis, which was of all birth certificates in the United States since 1985 and nearly all for the five years prior…

The difference in when women start families cuts along many of the same lines that divide the country in other ways, and the biggest one is education. Women with college degrees have children an average of seven years later than those without — and often use the years in between to finish school and build their careers and incomes.

People with a higher socioeconomic status “just have more potential things they could do instead of being a parent, like going to college or grad school and having a fulfilling career,” said Heather Rackin, a sociologist at Louisiana State University who studies fertility. “Lower-socioeconomic-status people might not have as many opportunity costs — and motherhood has these benefits of emotional fulfillment, status in their community and a path to becoming an adult.”

Here is it in pictures. Age of first birth in 1980:

Age of first birth in 2016:

The scooping out of data of women in their 20s is caused by education. Not education, of course, but the encampment at degree-producing centers.

At least with a degree you have earned the privilege to sit in a soul-sucking cubicle and devote your life to creating meaningless PowerPoint “decks.”