Charlie Kirk Tells 14-Year-Old Girl She Should Go to College Not to Study But Just to ‘Get an MRS Degree’

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When a 14-year-old girl told Charlie Kirk she was interested in political journalism and asked for his thoughts about college, the Turning Point USA founder told her not to worry about studying and instead treat college as merely an opportunity to obtain an “MRS degree” — troubling advice for an influential political figure to give to an impressionable child.

The interaction was highlighted by independent journalist Madeline Peltz, who attended TPUSA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit conference (YWLS), held in Grapevine, Texas earlier this month.

Peltz’s coverage of the right-wing organization and its conference are unquestionably critical. Her scathing Substack post written in the aftermath of YWLS accused TPUSA of “preying on young conservative women” by co-opting the Make America Healthy Again movement into “disordered eating and fatphobia repackaged for the right-wing Instagram era,” denounced the “bizarre way the event artificially sutures glamorous, well-paid career women in right-wing media like Alex Clark, Dana Loesch, and Brett Cooper with the insistence on settling down and having babies before the audience graduates high school,” and accused them of peddling the threat of “miserable spinsterhood” as a “classic fear tactic meant to shame young women for pursuing an independent life.”

The below clip shared by Peltz came from a Q&A Kirk held during the conference, from a longer video posted on TPUSA’s Rumble channel.

In the video, a girl who identified herself as a 14-year-old freshman in high school named Abby asked Kirk what he thought about the “pros and cons” of attending college, “because I’m interested in political journalism, and what would your advice be?”

Back in the ancient pre-Donald Trump days when I was involved in College Republican/Young Republican organizations, local GOP politics, and other conservative activism, a question like this from a young conservative would have been met with enthusiastic praise. My own interest in journalism was strongly encouraged, and I witnessed countless other young men and women urged to work hard and endeavor to provide a balance to the “liberal mainstream media” with their own conservative perspectives — not at the expense of faith and family, but something that could be done alongside those other priorities.

Kirk, however, finds no utility in a woman pursuing a college education except for the opportunity it presents to snare a husband. He began by addressing the “young ladies here in high school,” and asked the audience to raise their hands if “your top priority is get married and have kids.” Abby smiled and raised her hand, along with what appeared to be most of the girls and young women behind her.

Kirk then encouraged Abby and her peers to pursue the “MRS degree,” a term — usually used pejoratively — to refer to a woman who attends college to find a husband rather than for intellectual development or to further her professional career. A transcript of Kirk’s remarks:

OK. Interestingly, I think there is an argument to bring back the MRS degree. [Audience laughs.] No, seriously. And just be clear that’s why you’re going to college, right? Don’t lie to yourself, like, don’t like, “Ah, I’m going — I’m studying sociology.” No, you’re not. We know why you’re here and that’s OK, actually.

And that’s a really good reason to go to college, actually. Especially an SEC school, like, you will find a husband if you have the intent to find a husband at Ole Miss, like, it’s just going to happen, OK? Or wherever…or at University of Alabama.

But I always laugh, because — and by the way, we should bring back the celebration of the MRS degree, which is — no, serious, I mean, if you think about it, like, I say college is a scam, but if you’re going to find your life partner, like, that’s actually a really good reason to go to college.

You have a bunch of people that are single, you know? They’re at the prime of their, you know, let’s just say attractiveness, the, the, the dating pool is as robust as you’ll ever find, and they all live together over a four-year period.

Like, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t get much better than that, OK?  It doesn’t better after college there, and so yeah, you could go learn some stuff, that’s fine, I guess, or whatever, just don’t listen to your professors.

But, um, that actually was the reason why a lot of women went to college in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, and it worked for a lot — marriage rates have plummeted since then.

Peltz described this scene as “painful to watch,” with Abby’s “body language and facial expressions suggest[ing] she’s confused and uncomfortable,” but mostly because “this is an inappropriate way to speak to a child.”

As noted, Abby said she was only 14; she’s still young enough to have braces on her teeth and two years away from being allowed to have a driver’s license. It’s stunning to watch a 31-year-old man tell a 14-year-old aspiring journalist to abandon her educational ambitions, especially after I’ve heard for decades that having more people with right-leaning views enter journalism helps the conservative movement. Many of the best-known conservative female journalists are married with children; whether they chose to highlight that part of their life in their reporting or not, they did not abandon education and career to have a family.

Kirk himself has earned no formal education credentials past a high school diploma. He has mentioned in interviews that his dream school was the United States Military Academy at West Point but he was rejected, which he blamed on his spot going to “a far less-qualified candidate of a different gender and a different persuasion.”

There is, of course, no way to verify Kirk’s claim that West Point wanted him but admitted a woman or minority in his place. Commentators over the years have speculated that Kirk’s vitriol towards diversity, a calling card of his activism with TPUSA, has its roots in West Point’s denial, which was likely on merit due to its highly selective admissions standards.

I previously served on the local Service Academy Nomination Board in Orlando, appointed by then-Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), and can attest that West Point applicants are incredibly impressive young people. High GPAs and top test scores alone won’t cut it. Applicants are also expected to have significant sports/extracurricular accomplishments and community involvement, submit a qualifying nomination (usually from a member of Congress), and pass a medical examination and a “candidate fitness assessment” of speed, endurance, and agility (several timed runs, pull-ups, sit-ups, push-ups, basketball throws, etc.).

Kirk certainly has the ear of multiple Republican members of Congress now — not to mention President Trump — but at 18 he was only in the beginning stages of his networking in the conservative world. He was an Eagle Scout, but that’s very common among West Point applicants. There is simply nothing that even Kirk himself has claimed about his accomplishments that would suggest he was one spot shy of getting into West Point. (I’ll leave it to the reader to judge how Kirk might fare in a pull-up contest.)

Post-high school, Kirk’s education is limited to briefly attending a community college near his hometown. He quit before earning any certificate or degree after retired businessman and tea party activist Bill Montgomery encouraged him to focus full-time on TPUSA. The organization attracted seed money from other rich conservative megadonors like Foster Friess and Greg Gianforte.

Kirk never had the college experience himself — he was still living in his childhood bedroom for the first few years of TPUSA’s existence — and frequently bashed the value of a college education while building an organization that was ostensibly reaching out to high school and college students.

But how many high school graduates can rely on finding a wealthy benefactor to bankroll the launch of organization to immediately provide them lucrative full-time employment? Or can count on managing to strategically optimize the ever-mutating algorithms to build their own social media empires, like many of the YWLS speakers have?

Kirk’s advice to Abby is just plain terrible for any high school student — male or female, and regardless of marriage or family plans.

Many liberal and feminist writers have argued that dissuading women from education puts them at a disadvantage if they end up in abusive or unstable marriages, by making it harder for them to leave and financially support themselves and their children, but even traditionally conservative, happily married women can be bludgeoned by the tragic reality that there are no guarantees in life. The best-intentioned plans to stay at home and raise children and have your husband be the breadwinner can be derailed because of car accidents, cancer, or other unfortunate causes of untimely death or disability.

Moreover, homemakers still benefit from pursuing their own educational goals. Even parents who don’t choose to home school have nearly exclusive influence over their children during their critically important early years, and broadening their parents’ intellects makes them well-suited to shepherd children through their years of schooling and to encourage various interests and aptitudes. I definitely benefitted from the influence of my own mother, a now-retired Latin and math teacher who earned a Master’s in Education from Vanderbilt. She instilled in me a love of reading and music, strong skills in spelling and grammar, an interest in languages, and an appreciation for storytelling (as many who learned about classical mythology from Edith Hamilton’s book would agree).

As Peltz sharply points out, Kirk doesn’t live up to his own rhetoric as “he denigrates single, childless women over 30” (many of this year’s YWLS speakers fall in this category) and women who wait until after 30 to marry (which describes Kirk’s own wife Erika Kirk).

Kirk’s sheer brazenness is impressive, in a terrible sort of way. It’s one thing for a community college dropout to build an organization targeting college students. It’s an entirely deeper lack of shame to get young women to pay — and parents to pay for their daughters — to listen to him tell them to limit their own dreams and ambitions in the hope of living a hypothetical life he cannot promise them.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.