The Effect of Education on Fertility

An excerpt from *The Case Against Education* on "making babies with budget cuts"

Educated people have fewer kids. Few demographic laws are more strictly enforced. This law doesn’t just fit the modern United States.[i] High-education countries are less fertile than low-education countries, and countries’ fertility erodes as education advances, at least since 1900.[ii] Fertility gaps are big: Averaging over the world, low-education women outbreed high-education women by about one-third.[iii] Nation-by-nation, disparities of a full child or more are common.[iv]

In principle, education could be a mask for income, intelligence, status, democratization, or modernization. When statistically challenged, though, education stays strong.[v] To illustrate, take the United States from 1972 to 2012. During this era, each year of education seems to cut Americans’ fertility by .12 children. After statistically correcting for income, intelligence, demographics, and era, one year of education still seems to prevent .10 births.[vi] While education cools fertility for both sexes, it cools women’s more: Wives’ education matters three or four times as much as husbands’.[vii]

Does education sway child-bearing via leadership or peer effects? The leadership story is straightforward: Almost all schools – even schools that never mention birth control – explicitly urge students to delay child-bearing. And most schools at least insinuate that high-powered careers are better than big families. Peer effects make sense, too: Look at the Baby Boom. Globally, the mix remains unclear.[viii] At least in the modern United States, however, peer effects seem weak. Even though social class fully explains education’s effects on marriage and divorce, social class explains none of education’s effect on fertility.[ix] Dropouts who climb into the upper class still breed like dropouts; Ph.D.s who stumble into the lower class still breed like Ph.D.s.

When schools prompt their students to have fewer kids, then, they’re plausibly prompting society to have fewer kids, too. Education leads society toward a less populous future. Out of all the educational consequences we’ve scrutinized, this is the most impressive. The key question: Are these consequences impressively good or impressively bad?

If you’re convinced every country on Earth is overpopulated, education’s anti-natal effect is a great point in its favor. Anyone who accepts the dangers of low fertility, however, should tremble. Almost all developed countries are below replacement fertility. Germany, Japan, and Russia’s populations have fallen already.[x] Many other lands will join them in coming decades. Even worse, education doesn’t just sap overall population. It targets the educational elite, because the people most inclined to linger in school restrict their child-bearing the most. Whatever weight you put on human capital versus signaling, or nature versus nurture, this is demographically perverse. The flip side, happily, is that governments can apparently make babies with budget cuts, arresting their demographic troubles for less than nothing.[xi]

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Notes

[i] See Monte and Ellis 2014, and Isen and Stevenson 2011, pp.129-132.

[ii] See Balbo et al. 2013, Meisenberg 2008, and Skirbekk 2008.

[iii] Skirbekk 2008, p.161.

[iv] Lutz and Samir 2011, p.590.

[v] See generally Meisenberg 2008 and Skirbekk 2008.

[vi] The initial results come from regressing number of children (GSS variable identifier CHILDS) on years of education. The corrected results come from regressing number of child on years of education, IQ, log real family income, age, age squared, race, and sex. Controlling for spousal education cuts the effect of a year of respondents’ education from -.10 children to -.06 children.

[vii] Results from adding spousal education to the preceding regression, then separately analyzing male and female GSS responses.

[viii] See especially Basu 2002.

[ix] Results from adding GSS variable identifier CLASS to the preceding regression.

[x] United Nations 2016. Germany and Russia have both experienced slight rebounds, but Germany’s population peaked in 2003, and Russia’s peaked decades ago.

[xi] See chapter 7, pp.269-270 for the response of educational attainment to cost.

References

Balbo, Nicoletta, Francesco Billari, and Melinda Mills. 2013. "Fertility in Advanced Societies: A Review of Research." European Journal of Population 29 (1): 1-38.

Basu, Alaka. 2002. "Why Does Education Lead to Lower Fertility? A Critical Review of Some of the Possibilities." World Development 30 (10): 1779-1790.

Isen, Adam, and Betsey Stevenson. 2011. “Women’s Education and Family Behavior.” In Demography and the Economy, edited by John Shoven, 107-140. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lutz, Wolfgang, and K. Samir. 2011. "Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population." Science 333 (6042): 587-592.

Meisenberg, Gerhard. 2008. "How Universal is the Negative Correlation Between Education and Fertility?" Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies 33 (2): 205-229.

Monte, Lindsay, and Renee Ellis. 2014. Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012. Washington, DC: United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2014/demo/p20-575.pdf.

Skirbekk, Vegard. 2008. "Fertility Trends by Social Status." Demographic Research 18 (5): 145-180.

United Nations. 2016. “Data: Population, Total.” Accessed February 16, 2016. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL.