Do the More Educated Want Fewer Children?

Karen Guzzo and Sarah Hayford’s recent research note debunks the overly simplistic idea that people with more education have fewer children because they want fewer children. Here, I describe their evidence in the context of other important indicators that show there is no simple negative relationship between education and childbearing.

First, it is not the most educated women who have the fewest children. In the United States, women with a bachelor’s degree average 1.284 children apiece, while those with a master’s degree average 1.405, and those with a doctorate or professional degree average 1.523.¹ Admittedly, women whose education ends short of the bachelor’s degree have even more children than PhD holders: as education goes up, fertility goes down, but only up to a point. And that point for American women is the bachelor’s; after that, as education goes up, fertility increases.

Second, Guzzo and Hayford reviewed evidence that the relationship between education and fertility has changed over time. It used to be that the educated were the forerunners with respect to low fertility—the first to have a few kids whose long educations made them expensive rather than a bunch of kids who started working early in life. If you pile on top of that ideas like pregnancy doesn’t cost a woman in a minimum wage job much compared to a woman establishing a career, or that women without family responsibilities can more easily break the glass ceiling, it becomes easier to understand the popular conception that more education means fewer kids.

That popular conception doesn’t match all of reality. In Nordic countries, for those born in the early 1940s (reaching menopause around 1990), childlessness was markedly higher among the most educated; however, differences by education were minimal just 20 years later, and now it is the least educated who are the most likely to be childless.² Evidence of a shrinking or even reversing relationship between education and fertility has also been documented in other parts of Europe, in Australia, and in the United States.

Third—and this is where Guzzo and Hayford weigh in with their new evidence—it is important to consider whether any differences in actual childbearing by education are the result of different desires, or constraints in realizing those desires. I suggest that there are two straw [wo]men that should be gently set aside here: one is the uneducated woman who has more children than she wants because she doesn’t use contraception effectively, and the other is the educated women who has fewer children than she wants because her career has gotten in the way. Although certain individuals look exactly like these examples, we should not imagine that such women are typical of their education levels. Instead, we need to keep in mind that in societies with below-replacement fertility, it is typical for people to want more children than they actually have. To oversimplify, most people want about two children even in places where far fewer women actually have them. In the United States, there is very little difference by education when it comes to wanting children: 90-92% of women. 

However, there are bigger educational differences when it comes to intending to actually have a child. Among those who have not completed high school by age 19, only 82% intend to have a child, even though 90% say they want or probably want at least one. In contrast, 91% of those who have finished a bachelor’s degree intend to have child, with 92% wanting one. Women with less education are far less likely to intend to have wanted children than their counterparts with more schooling. This explains why only the least educated intend to have less than two children on average (1.92). Those with a high school diploma intend 2.03 children on average, and those with any college education intend 2.22 on average.

So even if we ignore the fact that education beyond the bachelor’s degree is associated with more childbearing—just focusing on the negative relationship between education and childbearing that persists in the United States up to the bachelor’s degree—Guzzo and Hayford give us cause to dismiss education differences in fertility goals as a plausible explanation for differences in fertility achievement. The argument is impeccable: we cannot say that goals explain why fertility goes down with education if goals themselves increase with education.

The researchers put their findings in context by saying: 

The idea that elites—those having, or in the process of achieving, higher levels of educational attainment and socioeconomic status—drive low fertility rates is prevalent in popular discourse in the United States (Wilks, 2020) and some demographic theories (Lesthaeghe, 2010). Our findings contradict this assumption: seeking higher education is not inconsistent with desiring and intending children, and higher education may even be linked to higher fertility goals. 

I applaud Guzzo and Hayford for marshalling evidence from the United States for this point. It builds on Steven Martin’s previous work suggesting that conflict between work and family roles used to result in educated women not having the children they wanted, but a new inequality has emerged in which educated women face less work/family conflict because their jobs are more flexible than lower-skilled jobs. This interpretation is also consistent with Maria Testa and Fabien Stephany’s 2017 suggestion that higher education in Europe corresponds to higher lifetime intended family size because more educated women anticipated having more resources to facilitate balancing paid work and childrearing (in other words, even if their jobs aren’t more flexible, they can afford to hire more child care, or eat out more often, or have their homes professionally cleaned). 

I’ll conclude by noting that it would likely be a mistake to assume that the link between higher education and higher fertility goals can only emerge in highly developed countries. When asked about their fertility goals back in 1993, young women in Ghana typically said that people should only have the number of children they could provide for, but those engaged in post-secondary education estimated that number would be around four for them, while those in junior secondary school were more likely to think they could only provide for around two.³ When describing that data in a 2002 paper, my co-authors and I suggested that when the transition from higher to lower fertility is propelled by economic crisis, the typical negative relationship between education and fertility might be disrupted. In light of Guzzo and Hayford’s new work, it seems like the assumption that more educated women want fewer children can be wrong in multiple contexts.

Laurie DeRose is a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Catholic University of America, and Director of Research for the World Family Map Project.

---

1. Both master’s degree holders and those with doctorates or professional degrees have significantly more children than women holding the bachelor’s, but the difference in the total fertility rate between the highest two educational categories is statistically insignificant.

2. See Figure 6b in Jalovaara et al. 2019: in Finland educational differentials in childlessness are still absent, but for the Nordic countries as a whole childlessness is more common among the least educated women.

3. See DeRose, Dodoo, and Patil 2002.