One of the most consistent findings in the social sciences is the negative association between education and fertility. This association appears when you compare more and less educated individuals within a country, and when you compare countries with different levels of education. The chart below shows the relationship between average years of schooling among women aged 15–64 and the total fertility rate. As you can see, it is strong and negative.
There are two main theories for why education is negatively associated with fertility. The economic theory says that education increases the opportunity cost of having children by raising women’s earnings potential. The cultural theory says that education changes women’s values, leading them to prioritise career over childbearing. Both theories may be true in part.
All this matters, of course, because the world — especially the Western world — is going through a fertility crisis. Not a single country in Europe has a birth rate above the replacement level—even the Nordic countries, which once bucked the trend toward low fertility, now have TFRs less than 1.6 children per woman. Why have birth rates cratered? One plausible explanation is rising education among women.
However, a new paper using a clever method finds that education may not have any effect on fertility after all. Neil Cummins managed to link birth and marriage records for a large sample of English women born during the 20th century. This enabled him to assemble a dataset with the women’s ages, their ages at marriage, and the number of children they had during the course of their lives.
His clever method to test whether education affects fertility was comparing women who were affected by compulsory schooling laws (which required them to stay in school for an extra year) to those who were born just before (and therefore weren’t required to stay in school for an extra year). The comparison serves as a ‘natural experiment’, where the ‘treatment’ is getting one more year of education.
Cummins’ results are shown below. The top panel corresponds to the 1947 reform, which extended compulsory schooling from age 14 to age 15. The bottom panel corresponds to the 1972 reform, which extended it further from age 15 to age 16. In each chart, the dots on the right-hand side of the zero line correspond to cohorts of women who were affected by the reform, while the dots on the left-hand side correspond to cohorts that were not affected.
In the lower-left chart, there is a hint of a positive impact on age at first marriage. But in the other four, there is no evidence of any effect whatsoever. Women who were required to stay in school for an extra year had just as many children as their counterparts who weren’t.
How can Cummins’ findings be reconciled with the strong negative association between education and fertility? One possibility is that education has zero causal effect on fertility and what’s really going on is that broader cultural changes (related to the demise of traditional gender roles) cause women to become more educated and to have fewer children.
This is only one study, and it will need to be replicated by other researchers. But it may turn out that what many social scientists thought was true is, in fact, not true at all.
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