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I think the bigger factor is women in the workplace. Education might well be a correlation, but the rates of childbirth didn’t fall nearly so dramatically until women began to enter the workplace in substantial numbers. If mom is working, the external cost of a child go up dramatically, and the benefits (mostly spending time bonding with the child, and in some cultures prestige) are a lot lower. Tbf, the upshot is that we as a society need to choose either women work or they have babies. Very few women do both, and those who try have fewer kids.
It's all a simple case of cause and effect. Back in the days of the patriarchy, traditional monogamous marriage basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for women and thus a social safety net. No matter how ugly, dumb or lazy you were as a woman, someone was going to marry you - this was pretty much assured. From then on, someone else was responsible for you. Now that the patriarchy is smashed and traditional marriage is dismantled, all this goes out the window. With abortion legalized and normalized, shotgun marriages disappeared and you can no longer use your fetus basically as a tool of blackmail to keep the man in the relationship. (I wonder how many people even thought this through when abortion was legalized?) All this means that you need to become economically self-reliant as a woman as a backup plan.
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I mean, I think the timing in the US is more coincidental and proof of other things going on, like the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy and general increase in access to good contraception. As I've said elsewhere, the overall birthrate slope lines up with pre-Depression rate continuing to drop, outside of the Baby Boom being an outlier. It's increased far recently, which may be a cultural thing, or like I said, things like IUD's being given to teenagers essentially eliminating a lot of accidental births, but the general shift was already happening when our grandparents were still children.
For example, in Iran, the percentage of women in the workforce reached a peak of 20% of the workforce (which means by simple math, a lot weren't) in the early 2000's, and hasn't significantly increased since then. Despite this, outside of a small 0.5 TFR rise in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the birthrate continued to drop from it's heights to about 2.0 in 2002, but despite women in the workforce not increasing and by some measures, decreasing TFR has continued to drop.
Now, what has changed is education. The literacy rate has quadrupled, primary & tertiary school attendance went up a lot more. Also, and I think this is highly undervalued - maternal mortality rate has also dropped by 2/3 in the past 20 years from
45 to15 - so from quasi-Third World to nearly first world numbers. Oh, and also, contraception usage is ~75%.Sure, entering the workforce is probably part of it, but I use countries like Iran as an example as if a quasi-authoritarian religious state can't really pull this is off if they educate women for rational reasons, even if they have limited access to the workforce by Western standards, then nothing in the the Western world is stopping this.
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