
Patrick T. Brown
Fellow
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work with the Life and Family Initiative focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.
Patrick T. Brown is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where his work focuses on developing a robust pro-family economic agenda and supporting families as the cornerstone of a healthy and flourishing society.
His writing has been published in The New York Times, National Review, Politico, The Washington Post, and USA Today, and he has spoken on college campuses and Capitol Hill on topics from welfare reform to child care and education policy.
He has published reports on paid leave and family policy with the Institute for Family Studies, and edited an essay series featuring working-class voices for American Compass. He is an advisory board member of Humanity Forward and the Center on Child and Family Policy, and a contributing editor to Public Discourse.
Prior to joining EPPC, Patrick served as a Senior Policy Advisor to Congress’ Joint Economic Committee (JEC). There, he helped lead research about how to make it more affordable to raise a family and more effectively invest in youth and young adults. He also previously worked a government relations staffer for Catholic Charities USA.
Patrick graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in political science and economics. He also holds a Master’s in Public Affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He and his wife Jessica have three young children and live in Columbia, S.C.
Wards of the State
Patrick T. Brown

The Build Back Better child-care plan would relegate religious providers to the margins.
Articles
City Journal / December 7, 2021
Loan Giveaways Won’t Boost Family Formation
Patrick T. Brown

Policymakers can improve options for parents without forgiving student debt.
Articles
City Journal / November 18, 2021
Thoughts on a Post-Roe Agenda
Patrick T. Brown

The pressure campaigns on religious freedom and voting bills would look like child’s play if a state moved to enact restrictions potentially enabled by Dobbs. Social conservatives need to prepare a counteroffensive.
Articles
National Review - November 29, 2021 issue / November 18, 2021
Virginia’s New Governor Should Improve Options for the Parents of Young Children
Patrick T. Brown

With D.C. consumed with a social spending bill that could dramatically reshape life for America’s families, Virginia could offer an example of authentically pro-family policy from early childhood to high school.
Articles
Institute for Family Studies / November 16, 2021
A Distinctly American Family Policy
Patrick T. Brown

Borrowing a family policy prescription from Helsinki or Budapest is bound to disappoint. A distinctly American family policy platform must be seen as expanding choice, not constraining it, and working with our national character, not trying to reshape it, all while understanding family as the essential institution in society, one that stakes an unavoidable claim on our public resources.
Articles
Public Discourse / November 11, 2021
5 Ways to Make America More Family-Friendly
Patrick T. Brown

The family is the fundamental unit of society, and has a claim on our resources. Here are five important steps policymakers could take to put that philosophy into practice.
Articles
National Catholic Register / November 10, 2021
If You Like Your Church Preschool, Can You Keep It?
Patrick T. Brown

‘Build Back Better’s’ plan for child care has an ugly blind spot when it comes to faith-based programs.
Articles
Deseret News / November 10, 2021
What the Build Back Better Act Would Mean for Families
Patrick T. Brown

Childcare subsidies would dramatically reshape the landscape for parents of young children—perhaps in ways its authors don’t intend.
Articles
The Dispatch / November 3, 2021
Examining the Relationship Between Higher Education and Family Formation
Patrick T. Brown

Proposals to reduce or eliminate student debt on a large scale are often proposed in the spirit of lifting barriers to family formation, allowing young adults to marry or become parents. But understanding what role student debt plays in the lives of young Americans is important before adopting widespread policy prescriptions.
Articles
Joint Economic Committee / November 3, 2021
Biden’s Reconciliation Plan Would Expand Marriage Penalties. That’s Not Build Back Better.
Patrick T. Brown

Not only do marriage penalties leave families economically worse off, they also undermine marriage, an essential institution in a functioning society.
Articles
USA Today / October 29, 2021
INTERVIEW: Patrick T. Brown on Working-Class Families and the Child Tax Credit
Patrick T. Brown

EPPC Fellow Patrick T. Brown talks with Spotlight on Poverty about the congressional debate over child tax credits and what working-class families think about proposed federal aid.
Articles
Spotlight on Poverty / October 27, 2021
Those worried about the state of higher education tend to cite woke students and campus controversies, but others have pointed to another, long-term problem: rising student-loan debt allegedly preventing young adults from getting married and starting a family. “You shouldn’t have to take on a mountain of debt and get a four-year degree you don’t want in order to get a good job,” Senator Josh Hawley has said. Declan Leary of The American Conservative argued last November that conservatives worried about low birth rates should acknowledge that “for college graduates the obvious route is to tackle student debt.”
But crushing student-loan debts aren’t necessarily causing young adults to give up on family formation. A report I wrote as a staffer with Congress’s Joint Economic Committee, released for the first time early this month, evaluates the evidence around family formation and the rising cost of college attendance. The bottom line: student debt is not the albatross around the necks of would-be newlyweds that it is often claimed to be. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem for some. Improving repayment options for those in difficult circumstances, while holding the line against the sweeping debt forgiveness being proposed by progressives, represents a better approach.
Falling fertility and rising student debt aren’t myths. Marriage and fertility rates have been on a steady decline, hitting record lows even before the pandemic year of 2020. At the same time, the share of young adults attending college hit a peak earlier this decade, and these students relied more than ever on student loans. In my paper, I find that the percentage of all households with any outstanding student debt rose from 8.9 percent in 1989 to 21.4 percent in 2019.
Media accounts often tie the debt and fertility trends together. One Wall Street Journal reporter spoke to a Chicago woman who graduated from a for-profit interior design school with six figures of debt. The graduate wondered aloud, “How could I consider having children if I can barely support myself?”
Yet declining marriage and fertility rates are happening across the board, while student-loan burdens are less widespread. The Federal Reserve finds that 70 percent of all U.S. adults, including 57 percent of those who attended college, have never incurred education-related debt. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Beth Akers, two-thirds of millennials hold no student debt. A Brookings Institution report by Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis argues that if “there is a crisis, it is concentrated among borrowers who attended for-profit schools and, to a lesser extent, 2-year institutions and certain other nonselective institutions”—not those carrying six-figure balances from elite programs that receive most media attention.
My report, analyzing data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, finds that the average household student-loan balance tends to be inflated by large outliers. Examining the median of the data, rather than the simple mathematical average, shows a much more gradual rise in student-loan burdens. Most of the observable effect on marriage and fertility comes from people who chose to attend graduate school.
Though debt and default rates may not be at the crisis levels touted by progressives, the timing of student debt may merit special consideration. The peak repayment timeframe for student loans coincides with the prime years for family formation. Even as the evidence suggests that some individuals with exceptionally high loan burdens, particularly women, are more likely to delay marriage, it is scarcer overall that student loans are associated with lower fertility. And on balance, large debt burdens are shouldered by a small subset of households, many with higher educational attainment and higher earning potential.
My research focuses on the nominal value of student loans—not the broader question of whether going to college leads one to push off starting a serious relationship, get married, or have a child. College graduates tend to get married later in life than do non-college attendees, though they get married at higher rates and have lower rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing. The type of person who willingly spends several years of his life pursuing a Ph.D. may have already been willing to forgo a family in pursuit of professional success. Even if college loans themselves do not directly hinder family formation, an excessive cultural emphasis on formal education can encourage a mindset that puts marriage and parenthood in the backseat.
But on the margins, public policy can reward or punish individuals for getting married. The tax code’s treatment of the student-loan interest deduction constitutes a marriage penalty. Currently, married spouses filing jointly can deduct $2,500 in student loan interest payments, the same amount as an individual. Increasing that cap to $5,000—the same as the two spouses would have gotten if they had remained unmarried—would be a straightforward fix. The Lifetime Learning Credit, which allows taxpayers to deduct qualified education-related expenses, has the same problem. Improving the poorly run Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (which the Biden administration has taken steps to do) or introducing a set-aside for spousal income in income-driven repayment programs could further expand options for would-be spouses or parents.
No one wants young adults to be crushed by student loans. Supporting community college, trade schools, and nontraditional pathways to the workforce—as well as encouraging more competition in higher education—would help more young people increase their options without overreliance on debt. But sweeping loan forgiveness proposals such as those leading progressives are pushing would do nothing to improve the performance of higher education going forward. And the evidence suggests that these policies wouldn’t do much to boost rates of family formation, either.
Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former senior policy advisor at the congressional Joint Economic Committee.