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Generally speaking, people who think that education reduces fertility rates do not think that it mainly does this by making women have arrested development into their thirties, they think it mainly does it by giving women more options in the economy and thus making them more independent from a need to settle down with a man just to have a decent standard of living. Granted, the reactionary flavor of the argument does often talk about arrested development. But I think the reactionary flavor is currently a minority view.
Here's the thing though, I don't think it makes anyone more independent, neither men nor women. You're spending massive amounts of time idling to get a piece of paper, that will allow you to get a piece of paper, that will hopefully unlock some doors for you, sometime in the future. But all things considered, that's limiting your options, not expanding them.
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Right. It turns out being able to work and not having your economic security tied to another human being is seen as a positive, especially even in say, parts of the world that aren't as advanced as the Western world on women's rights. Part of the reason a disproportionate number of people working in sweatshops in Asia were women (and was the same of say, New York in 1843), was that it allowed a degree of economic freedom that wasn't possible in basically the alternative of substantive farming, either in rural Vietnam in 2013 or rural New England in 1884.
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