"When Republican senators quietly tucked a major new student aid program into the 774-page budget bill last month, they not only approved a five-year, $3.75 billion initiative. They also set up what could be an important shift in American education: for the first time the federal government will rate the academic rigor of the nation's 18,000 high schools.

The measure, backed by the Bush administration and expected to pass the House when it returns next month, would provide $750 to $1,300 grants to low-income college freshmen and sophomores who have completed "a rigorous secondary school program of study" and larger amounts to juniors and seniors majoring in math, science and other critical fields.

... The new one-year grants, designed to supplement the broader, $13 billion Pell Grant program, range from $750 for low-income college freshmen and $1,300 for sophomores to $4,000 for juniors and seniors who are pursuing majors in the physical, life or computer sciences, mathematics, technology, engineering or certain foreign languages. Applicants must have a 3.0 grade point average to be eligible as sophomores, juniors and seniors."

"According to the Nellie Mae Corporation's most recent National Student Loan Survey, average undergraduate student loan debt in 2002 was $18,900, up 66 percent since 1997 (the median debt figure rose 74 percent from that latter year to $16,500).  Students attending graduate schools reported an additional $31,700 in average debt, an increase of 51 percent since 1997.  Graduates from professional schools, notably law and medicine, carried an average of $91,000 in accumulated total debt.  Overall, $53.4 billion was loaned in 2003-04 alone, an increase of over 200 percent since 1992-93.

...The unanticipated consequences of this method for funding higher education become especially evident when we consider its effects on family formation, notably marriage and childbearing.

...The anecdotal evidence is not encouraging.  Dating behavior may be affected.  One 31-year university instructor, bearing $100,000 in student loan debt, reports that when he begins dating a new woman, he "makes sure" to inform her up front of his financial situation.  Predictably, this discourages second dates.  Marriages are also delayed due to debt.  A young woman in Cincinnati, now a publicist, expects to have her student loans paid off in two years.  However, her boyfriend still owes $40,000 and 'he doesn't feel financially ready for marriage.'  In addition, the inauguration of childbearing may be delayed.  One leading source of advice to prospective parents counsels that, before having a child, they 'pay off any personal debt they have accumulated over the years-student loans, car loans, and so on.'"

Did laborsaving household appliances that proliferated in the United States after World War Two leave homemakers with little to do other than shop and contemplate their alienation a la Betty Freidan? While some conservatives have adopted this feminist spin of the 1950s, three economists in the American Economic Review suggest that the "atypical burst in technological progress in the household sector" kept women busy, not bored. By lowering the cost of bearing children, those domestic advances allowed women to have larger families, triggering the dramatic increase in postwar fertility known as the baby boom.

Challenging conventional wisdom that sees the baby boom as a response to the trauma of economic depression and war, the researchers note not only that the boom actually started in the 1930s, but also that the women most responsible for the peak of the boom in 1960 (when they were between 20 and 24 years of age) were too young to have been affected by those two experiences. Yet these young mothers were not too young to reap measurable gains in household efficiency that had been in the works for decades and reduced the burdens of housekeeping and child-rearing.

The economists chronicle the "unparalleled technological advance in the household sector" of the twentieth century, including refrigerators in the 1920s, fully automated washing machines in the 1930s, and frozen foods in the 1940s. They note that between 1929 and 1975, the household appliance-to-GDP ratio increased by a factor of 2.5. They also credit the home economics movement with improving the design of appliances and houses, resulting in modern kitchens, complete with continuous work surfaces and located at the center of the house. The impact of these advances began to gather steam, they note, in the 1930s and 1940s, exactly when fertility started to rise.

Even as market productivity improved sevenfold during this time, the economists found that their documented, relatively modest 1.2-fold increase in the efficiency of the household sector was all that was needed to boost fertility rates. While they do not explore why this increase was unable to sustain higher fertility rates beyond one generation, their analysis nonetheless confirms that investing in the home economy pays dividends in the nursery.