These numbers seem kind of low to me, even when I think of people in my life anecdotally. I wonder what is going on there.
See “friendship paradox”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
It depends if "you" refers to a specific person, which it seems to do in context.
And by definition, the ones with fewer friends also are known by fewer people.
None of them are in your friend group.
You can't have a kid out of high school and expect to raise them with a decent life anymore. This is a global trend btw, not just the US.
From fixed standards, the median kid being raised today is doing way better than 100 years ago, even though people chose to have way more kids 100 years ago: - Cars were death traps. - Dying in infancy and 20s, 30s was common. - Very few people went to college.
100 years ago, no one felt "indecent" to raise a kid they can't afford to send to college, or knew at a 1% chance of dying due to malnutrition. Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state.
I think you're overdramatizing how prevalent such a concern is, and would wager that's mostly relegated to people in a certain social class and who've been instilled with the idea that University specifically is the key to success.
Otherwise, many people in certain geographies aren't having kids because the prospect of being able to continue putting a roof over our own head seems tenuous at best, and we're just not so driven to have kids that moving quite far out of our communities is worth it, which leaves us in a limbo state of having scarce upward mobility but access to other valuable attributes, and the ability to keep that going for a while.
Granted, I'm not personally driven to have kids anyway, but if my early thirties starts catching up to me, my first concern is not going to be whether I can pay for their college, it's whether or not I have a stable mother in the picture, and whether or not having a kid is something we're equipped to shelter, feed, cloth, and support through basic public education. Considering that even getting a separate room for ourselves would nearly double our rent, and buying a place with one could cost nearly 850k (without leaving even approximately where we currently live) it's not looking good.
More children = more workers = family better off
If we're going to switch the economy to high-skill, we should realize that decreases the value of children to the family, which means we need to backfill that with entitlements (e.g. free childcare, SNAP, public school and college, etc).