PREVIEW: The Friday Edition - Is the global fertility decline a crisis?

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1:54The decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? Washington-wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington right now and how they may affect your finances and portfolio. Listen at Schwab.com-slash-eligible. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking and a little bit of our take. This is Editor Audrey Morehead, and today you're going to be hearing a lot of my take.

2:55Because for our Special Friday edition this week, I'm here to talk about an issue that I've been reading and thinking about a lot over the past few years, the fertility decline, and what it means for us. But first, I want to take you back to June of this year. When Syracuse University, a private New York college known for its top-tier graduate programs and storied men's basketball team, announced that it was on track to miss its enrollment targets for fall 2026. Undergraduate tuition makes up the bulk of the university's revenue, and as a result of the enrollment shortfall, Chancellor J. Michael Haney said the university would consider reworking programs and downsizing staff. Haney cited a multitude of factors in the drop in new students, including tightening for and visa programs. But he also framed it in the context of a long anticipated decline in U.S. higher education enrollment. A decline not brought on by rising prices, changing attitudes, or fewer visa students, but something simpler, stickier, and maybe more surprising. A baseline decline in the number of college-aged Americans. High education experts have expected an enrollment cliff based on this decline since at least 2016, when K-12 school

3:59class sizes were already decreasing. In 2024, the Western Interstate Commission for High Education predicted that the number of high school graduates would peak in 2025 and decline through at least 2041. Fast forward to this June and the announcement from Syracuse led some to clear that we had finally reached the demographic cliff. And they might be right. The enrollment decline presents a major challenge, already causing universities to cut programs, layoff staff, and in some cases shut their doors. Combined with other headwinds, academic institutions are facing, the U.S. higher education system will almost certainly look radically different 20 years from now than it does today. But while the demographic cliff is hitting colleges and universities hardest right now, its impacts won't be constrained to education. An aging population, fewer young people, and eventually a declining overall population will have major effects on a world that relies on younger people for economic output. Amid all this, a serious debate has emerged over the birth rate decline in the United States. These debates have only intensified in recent years, with the

5:02rise of the pronatal movement both within and outside of the Trump administration. And as with nearly all public policy issues in our polarized era, concern around the issue has immediately become hyper politicized. But this bifurcated response does a disservice to an issue that deserves serious attention, because the fertility rate is declining, and that decline will impact all of us sooner than we think. The question then is what we should do. While most of us likely think of fertility as a person's ability to have children, fertility is also a demographic term that refers to the number of births a woman actually has. From there, our demographers use a few different metrics to parse fertility data. The general fertility rate or GFR measures the total number of births per a thousand women of childbearing age in a given place. GFR is useful for its simplicity and immediacy. By looking at the GFR in New York City over the past five years, for example, policy makers can anticipate early education costs and attempt to design maternal care policies. But GFR isn't useful as a predictive measure for future births, because it cannot account for how

6:05other demographic factors, like the age distribution of the women in the cohort, affect the number of births. Some demographers have recently begun using more specialized fertility metrics to predict population change. The effect of fertility rate or EFR accounts for the number of children who survive into adulthood, and the completed fertility rate or CFR measures the average number of children women have had by the end of their childbearing years. EFR gives a fuller understanding of historical trends in various locations. CFR provides a more comprehensive understanding of a given generation's fertility trends. But the most commonly used term, and the one you've likely seen if you read about fertility casually, is the total fertility rate or TFR. TFR measures the average number of children that a woman will have over her childbearing years, usually defined as around ages 15 to 49, based on current birth trends. Research bucket women into roughly five year age bands, like 15 to 19, 20 to 24, and so on, and they use that information to create a weighted average for the number of children each woman will have throughout her life.

7:07Finally, you might also have heard the term replacement level fertility rates, which usually refers to the number of children the average woman must have to keep the population level exactly constant. In developed countries like the United States, the replacement rate is usually around 2.1 births per woman. It's slightly above two to account for children who don't survive to adulthood. Nations with a higher child mortality rate have a correspondingly higher replacement rate. Notably, the replacement rate doesn't actually describe whether or not a population is growing. A population that's reproducing at a rate lower than replacement could still grow, especially if mortality rates are low, healthcare access is good, and immigration is high. However, replacement rates are useful for determining whether a population might eventually start shrinking. So now that you have the terms out of the way, let's get into the data.

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