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I mostly agree with this overall sentiment. The problem is family formation is delayed, which makes women have less than the number of kids they want, which if they had the number they want would be a bit low, but still high enough to not make our populations look like inverted pyramids.
So, the simplest solution is do the opposite of what we have been doing: shorten school, and make the shorter school a better employment signal. This means, High School ends at 16 or 17, and college is 3 years. Both having vigorous entrance and exit exams intended to mean only people who really need college go, and only those who are super qualified finish. Law and medicine would also be reformed to fit into this new system and you'd be done with those in 3 or maybe 4 years after HS. Oh, and because college entry and exit is actually hard again, fewer women will do it, which dulls hypergamy effects.
Tightening up educational requirements again is probably a good idea for other reasons, but I'm not sure it would do much for fertility. It's very common for women to graduate at
22, and get married at30. They can and do date during college, so if the culture were oriented differently, even college educated people could be getting married at 23 or so. That they're not seems to largely be a matching problem -- that each relationship lasts for several years without leading to marriage or children, and then eventually people settle.I do think that college has been overhead as a path to the middle class for working class children, and that was a mistake. They have become bloated, politically charged institutions and should be replaced or reformed. My own family, going back four generations at least, were educated lower middle class (teachers, professors, psychologists, cooks who like to talk about books, etc), and I would be disappointed if my own children don't have an opportunity to enjoy something approximating college, even if it doesn't increase their job prospects all that much.
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