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I think that the job of housewife is on its way out, and has been on its way out for the last century.
Back in 1800, with no washing machines or fridges, it was a full-time job to take care of the needs of a family (especially as family size was large due to lack of contraceptives). A man (or anyone) who worked full time simply did not have the time to take care of washing his clothes and cooking his meals.
Luckily, we made these chores much less time-consuming and freed women to do more useful work. And they do. There are mothers who are teachers, physicians, clerks and a myriad of other professions.
Naturally, the markets (especially housing) have reacted to this reality (plus a ton of other factors), and the age where you could raise a family with a single income from not-highly-specialized labor is over.
As you point out, social changes have made the strategy of just marrying a man and relying on him to provide for you high-risk, because if he is rich enough to pay for you to stay at home and watch the kids, he is likely also rich enough to replace you with a younger, more attractive woman in a decade or two.
I think that a big point of both men and women going to college is the signaling value both towards employers and towards potential mates. Roughly, the same qualities which are valued in an employee (somewhat smart, willing to submit to an institutional system, ability to achieve long-term goals, etc) are also good qualities in a partner. A degree, especially in a strongly regulated field like law or medicine, will significantly update your estimate on the earning potential of a person. Then there is education as a mark of social class. A man from a family of academics will probably not marry someone who dropped out of high school. (Sure, there will always be some men who prefer to marry 18yo village girls, but "I will just wait for some Trump-like man to marry me" will not work for the vast majority of them.)
I agree that there are probably bullshit degrees pursued by women who really want to graduate college with an MRS degree, but I think that the answer is not not cut down on women in college, but to push degrees which can actually earn money.
The pattern "Earn a degree, get pregnant at 30 and then become a stay-at-home mum" is obviously not very efficient. But I don't think we will go back to "get pregnant at 20 and then become a housewife". What society should aim for is "Earn a degree, get pregnant at 30 (if you want), re-enter the workforce a few years later (e.g. part-time)".
I guess your point on romantic signaling is probably true, though I hate signaling and reflexively oppose the position on principle.
But I actively disagree that the most important thing is to push moneymaking degrees, on a couple of points.
First, the whole degree-to-job pipeline is overrated. The degree is a proxy for, roughly, intelligence, and as long as you have the real meat you will be able to leverage the actual work. (This is my life story. Started in humanities and trivially switched to work in STEM. I’ll admit software makes this easy.)
Second, while cash obviously matters, I think the most important thing is to learn wisdom and be a good and broad-based parent to your children. This is what my parents were to me. And while I decry the sorry shape of the liberal arts in universities, the actual subject I consider paramount. So rather than just add work training for women, I think bringing refinement and rigor back to the degrees would be better. (And helping people who have no business being in college get out. That’s another topic.)
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The thing is that cooking and washing were compatible with childcare, while teaching and medicine generally are not. Children benefit from stay-at-home moms; I did, anyway. And if your values differ from those of the broader culture, daycare is likely to drag your kids at least part way to that culture.
I know that this isn't practical for all families. But we should try to make it practical for as many families as we can. And for those couples who are on the fence about what to do, we should let them know that it's good for them and their kids.
Edit: Since this discussion started with college, I'd like to add that the liberal arts are valuable for most intelligent people -- the actual liberal arts, not activism in a skinsuit. Making those available in a way that is culturally and economically compatible with housewifery as a life path is a worthwhile goal in itself.
I believe you, but I would still argue that there are opportunity costs. A one-year-old requires a caretaker 24x7, and presumably might benefit from that caretaker being their mother. A ten-year-old requires much less adult supervision. Someone to cook dinner and make sure that they either attend or have called by then is certainly helpful, but 24x7 supervision would be actively harmful.
Now, if your model stay-at-home mom starts having kids age 18 and then has a child every other year for as long as nature will allow, I will grant you that she will have her hands full taking care of her kids for a significant fraction of her work life. But in most Western marriages, it is not like that. Instead, she will have two or three children, which will keep her occupied for a decade, but once her smallest child goes to school, she will have a lot of time on her hands for the better part of her work life.
I am not arguing that working 40h a week is the only valid model of how to spend your life, and if someone is happy playing video games or join some club or have an OnlyFans career or dedicate their life to gardening, who am I to tell them that they are wrong? Still, having opted not to have earned a degree seems somewhat likely to limit your options at self-actualization, and earning a degree remotely at age 40 is likely going to be harder.
I think that this is unavoidable in general. I would advise to raise kids in a culture you are at least halfway comfortable with. Even with homeschooling and everything, you can not completely shield your child from the local culture. Sure, there are some who try, like some Muslim families trying to raise their daughters according to Sharia law in the middle of Western cities, but I think that their success is mixed at best.
Personally, I would not fret overly much about it. I was raised (mildly) Roman Catholic, and it did not stop me from seeing the light of Igtheism at 15 or so. While I am sure that there are some horror stories about some overachieving kindergarten teacher telling white kids to hate themselves, I think the median version of the SJ creed taught to kids is much less harmful. Like Santa Claus, blank-slatism is the sort of lie which is unlikely to harm the development of a kid much. They can still learn about the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis and HBD later.
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Bring back the dame school, but don’t let feminists within 100 yards of it.
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