Why educated women have fewer children

In other words, the gender norms surrounding higher education today both place enormous pressure on women to obtain higher degrees than they are likely to use, and in turn, the time spent pursuing those degrees reduces the odds that women have as many children as they want to have. Notably, this finding that greater time spent enrolled reduces fertility while enrolled, but only reduces lifelong childbearing if it goes on so long as to swamp much of the 20s and possibly 30s, is consistent with all the academic research on education in industrialized countries and fertility.

As just one of many examples, a recent paper found that when the United Kingdom legally mandated more years of high school education, it successfully reduced teen birth rates, but did not lower the lifelong fertility accomplishment of those women. This then raises the question: can lower fertility be explained by changes in how many women are enrolled in education?

Again, changes in enrollment can explain a modest amount of the decline in fertility, but not very much. And again, the entire explanatory power comes before since , in fact, enrollment rates have actually declined for most age groups, and so changes in enrollment cannot explain the ongoing decline at all. Neither the degree-attainment effect of education nor the enrollment effect can explain lower fertility.

Maybe women today are more likely to live in urban areas, and that makes them have lower fertility? The image of the urban Millennial is strong : Nielsen has written on it extensively , and articles about why Millennial women have fewer kids routinely discuss urban housing costs, rather than housing costs generally.

It is true that urban areas have lower fertility. The graph below shows age-specific birth rates by urban classification. Rural people have more babies and have them younger. People in city centers have fewer babies and have them later.

Suburbia is in-between. As with education, there is a bias in this data-driven by life-cycle factors, but it is much less severe than for education: urban, rural, and suburban areas all have women in every age group, and there are many moves between them that are not correlated with fertility. Furthermore, many people live their whole lives in one area. In total, rural women in could expect about 2.

This holds up across racial and ethnic groups as well, and holds up with controls for education too: educated women in rural areas have more kids than educated women in urban areas, etc. It stands to reason, then, to see if changing composition of the population may have a role to play. It does not. Chaining the urban mix of the population to levels has virtually no effect on total fertility whatsoever. This kind of large-scale population distribution variable is so slow-moving, it is unlikely to provide any explanatory power for short-run fertility trends like the recent decline.

Neither education, enrollment, nor urban-ness can fully explain falling fertility. The recent decline in fertility is not because of women becoming more educated though they are , or because of their spending more time enrolled although time spent enrolled can reduce fertility.

Nor is it because they are living in low-fertility dense urban cores at a higher rate. The most compelling explanations for low fertility remain a combination of increasingly delayed marriage with rapidly-rising financial burdens like student loans, or spiraling rents in cities that prevent new housing construction. Until those problems are solved, fertility is unlikely to make a sustained or robust rebound. He blogs about migration, population dynamics, and regional economics at In a State of Migration.

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Low Fertility Is Not Because of More Education The first way to tackle this is to look at age-specific fertility rates by educational level. Is lower fertility due to increasing educational attainment among women? Conclusion Neither education, enrollment, nor urban-ness can fully explain falling fertility.

Related Posts. Bradford Wilcox and Max Eden. Education , Politics. Fertility , Coronavirus. But he also complains they are having all the children. He writes:. Going further than "reverse Darwinism," Last also said on his Glenn Beck network appearance that we have "survival of the weakest in a way, but even worse. But before debunking this interpretation of the facts, we might first wonder if the facts are even true. In the world of conservative news, it would seem that poor people are sucking the government dry while overpopulating the country with paupers and criminals.

Meanwhile, to others—admittedly the set I'm more familiar with—children are seen as the accessories of the narcissistic elite, and rich people are having more kids.

The facts, though, are that poor women have more children and women with more children are poorer , and that the fertility rates of more-educated women are rising , not falling. Fact 1: Women with less education in the U. From U. Census Bureau data , we know that, among women who were finishing their childbearing years ages in , those with less than a high school degree had borne the most children 2. Last's comment that "Women who go to college or graduate school are unlikely to have even two children" seems to follow from the fact that college graduates have an average of 1.

Because about one in every five college graduates have no children, we only get to an average 1. But this does not mean that, "The bearing and raising of children has largely become the province of the lower classes. So here is the distribution of children according to their mothers' education level, next to the distribution of women:. You can see that women with the least education did have more kids than their share of the population: 14 percent versus 10 percent. But there were twice as many children born to women who were college graduates.

So women with higher education are almost doing their share in producing the workers of the future. When it comes to childbearing, in other words, the highly educated are almost pulling their weight.

Fact 2: Educational disparities in fertility rates are decreasing. Among women reaching the end of their childbearing years, the last 15 years have seen a decline in the disparity I just described. Completed fertility rates have increased for those with more education, and decreased for those with less, from to Remember that, even though their fertility rates are quite high, high school dropouts represent only 10 percent percent of women ages 40 to To be sure: There are a lot of different ways of measuring fertility rates.

I'm using completed fertility—the number of children even born to women who reach the age at which childbearing becomes rare the census defined this as ages 35 to 44 until , and ages 40 to44 since.

And this shows women with less education having more children. However, in any given year, women with higher education are more likely to have a child. That's because people spend fewer years with advanced degrees; that is, women who end up with advanced degrees spend years without them first, usually not having children while they advance their educations and careers.

So in , women with MA degrees or higher were just 9 percent of women in the childbearing ages, but they had 11 percent of the babies. The counterintuitive thing here is the rise in fertility among women with more education which Last might be pleased to be able to call Darwinian.

I could suggest a few reasons for this:. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest.