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Yeah, the most significant change in education IMO is the normification of leaving your hometown for university. Catastrophic social norm by Darwinian standards.
That problem matters as well, but my main issue with over-educating is that it basically means that by the time a couple is ready to settle down and is financially stable enough to think about having kids, they are too old to have said kids, or at best one or maybe two. Add in the much longer dependent stage means committing to a much longer project that’s actually quite resource intensive, which means that parents need even more resources to devote to their children. It’s actually insane how many obstacles we put in front of the couple who might want to have kids.
I wouldn't say that. Even if you do grad school, you're still out by 25, unless you do a doctoral degree of some sort, which is a pretty tiny percentage of the population. There's plenty of time to have a couple kids starting then.
The problem is that 25 isn't the starting point! The issue is you typically went off to another city for university, which made you lose contact with your high school girlfriend(s), then go to yet another city to actually settle down after that, so you lose contact with all your university girlfriend(s), and so by the time you're 25 you likely don't even have any serious marriage prospects because you and everyone around you keeps relocating to different places. This is a ridiculous social model.
If everyone would just stay put for a while, I think the issue would resolve itself. For example, the Mormons don't have much issue settling down and getting married, and they're not exactly operating under an 18th century apprenticeship mentality. But they do all go to the same university (BYU), so while they are relocating in a technical sense, they're all relocating to the same place, so it doesn't really count in the same way it does for normal kids, where everyone scatters to the four winds after high school graduation and never sees each other again. That, and BYU is a university that actively encourages them to marry, rather than presenting marriage as some icky distraction from study.
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