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Again, I’m trying to optimize births, and particularly high quality births. If a woman goes to college, she’s going to delay childbearing until after college, and if she’s highly intelligent and goes as far as she can, she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.
And if we’re shooting to simultaneously try to get high IQ people to have more kids, then the above is the worst thing to do. A woman with high IQ giving birth to 3-5 high IQ kids is likely to do more to raise the general IQ of the country than anything she could accomplish in the workplace. I’m sure there might be one or two high IQ women who will make life-altering contributions to science, but if you lost that and had that woman give birth to 3-4 high IQ kids who go on to do similar things you end up getting a better return.
That would be true if masters degree programs ended in a woman's thirties. They don't. An average woman who marries at 25 is totally capable of having 3+ children and there's lots of examples known to me personally of this happening. Heck, there's an example downthread of a man whose wife had four children after finishing her residency first.
Yes, but people typically do masters degrees because they want masters-degree-level careers. The masters degree itself is probably only the first stepping stone; they will need to do oversubscribed entry-level jobs that may require them to move around a lot and/or devote lots of hours per day. If you get a masters and then start having 3+ children then I think you're either going to be a very absent mother or you might as well burn the diploma now. I would say it's going to be another 5 years until that woman feels stable enough to consider children.
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