The MRS Degree — Guest Post by Johnathan Edwards

My friend Johnathan has responded to the debate on fertility with a perspective I think is shared by many, and which deserves discussion. –Briggs

I had a discussion with my wife the other day. She recalled a time in college or high school when the teacher wrote up on the board three letters, MRS. And he told the girls in the class that this was the best postgraduate degree meant for women. My wife explained that at the time that she had no idea what it really meant and she didn’t even give it a second thought.

It’s 30 years later and I think back to that time. In that time period we know that it was considered a normal thing, so to speak, as women were still emerging in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

What’s interesting to think about is the philosophy behind the motivation to write something like that in a schoolhouse educating young minds. Back then women were having many more children and there was hardly any other way. Was this a cry for help at the same time a prediction of the future?

As society moves forward. I’m not going to argue if it’s progression or regression. Now we’re facing negative reproduction rates, South Korea and Japan will no longer exist, perhaps in our lifetime, if they don’t start reproducing or bringing more people to the country.

America’s total fertility rate now sits near 1.6 child births per woman, which is well below the 2.1 replacement level. It’s obvious that we are on a path to a population decline.

At the same time there is a visible cultural and policy push to encourage marriage, for women to have more children, and have larger families. Which comes to the question, what are we building America for? Is it only to succeed in your job and make money and forfeit the kids? That is by definition working for the economic machine rather than humanity.

Vice President JD Vance discussed this theme with Bishop Robert Barron in their July 2026 conversation about Vance’s book Communion. Vance described how elite environments, such as Yale Law, treat credentials and career advancement as the only social currency, while family barely registers. He contrasted that with the community he grew up in, where people asked first how your kids were doing. He also warned against making an idol of the economy—for example, treating higher female labor-force participation as a reason to devalue childbearing.

Left unchecked, that philosophy, leads to a collapse of civilization on paper. As noted earlier, the same pattern now appears to be unfolding in practice in real time, with shrinking cohorts of young people already straining schools, labor markets, and the social contract that once assumed each generation would outnumber the last.

So, I continued the discussion with my wife, what’s the better path? Is there a way for mothers to raise their children and still find a work-life balance?

My wife from that school experience has graduated from high school university and became a physician assistant and she’s a successful mother and has found a work-life balance that seems to gel with all of us. I think that’s the challenge before us nowadays is to help our educators motivate young women to learn and become good mothers. And for those who want to raise children, let that be a path as well.

Because as we’re seeing, being alone at 50, 60, 70 70 doesn’t often work out to be a great deal. Seeing a single person in the hospital with a broken hip needing surgery and has no one to take care of them is not ideal for them or society.

Perhaps with online degrees and communities like the Peterson Academy and Great Courses, Hillsdale College, Prager University, and many others is a solution. Perhaps this lends a chance for our mothers to comfortably raise a family while educating themselves. Certainly the people behind these programs are considering that mothers can stay at home while learning.

While I don’t have the answers, one thing I can say for sure is that when you put the machine first, that system grows so big it forcibly collapses on itself. Or perhaps that’s the question we all should be asking ourselves. Whether we should strike up our emotions because some past professor wrote three letters on the board. Or what it is that we may do about it.

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