Who Are the Stay-at-Home Mothers?

Women who have received a superior education are more likely to leave the work force to stay home with their children.

Charles Murray reports on a study conducted by Joni Hersch. Comparing women who went to the top institutions of higher learning, tier 1 schools to those who went to lesser schools, Hersch discovered that:

women from tier 1 schools are significantly more likely to be home with the kids than the others — 68% of mothers from the tier 1 schools were employed, compared to 76% of those from the other schools.

One would think, Murray continues, that the opposite would be true:

These numbers shouldn’t make sense. Who gets into tier 1 schools? Not just highly able women, but also women who are ambitious enough to want to be in those schools. It is plausible that they would be more likely, not less, to continue their careers after they have children than women who, on average, are surely less intellectually able and probably less intensely ambitious than the tier 1 women.

More reflection yields a cogent explanation:

Hersch also documents that women from tier 1 schools are more likely than other women graduates to have parents with college educations and to be married to men holding jobs that require a college education. Add to that some other characteristics of women who have graduated from elite schools that Hersch does not address but are established by other sources: Those with children are almost always married. They are not only married to men with college educations, they are likely to be married to men who have also graduated from elite schools. Their family incomes are likely to be high. They tend to live in places with the best schools (or send their children to the best schools).

Women who chose to stay at home with their children are the ones who are most likely to have a choice. They have the most stable family lives; they are married to the men most likely to be able to support a family.

Thus,the “ruling class” interbreeds and offers advantages that are not available to the rest of the population.  

Murray reports:

So Professor Hersch has established that the next generation of children who have everything from genes to family structure to money going for them are also more likely to have a stay-at-home mom — and not just any mom, but one who has been sifted through the micron-fine mesh of the admissions process at elite schools and been judged to have both the IQ and other sterling qualities that gained her entrance, and who is devoting that package of exceptional abilities to the upbringing of her children. Lucky kids. And a new upper class polished to an ever-shinier gloss.