Education and Fertility in Europe: Stylized Facts, Expected and Surprising Findings

It is widely known that the expansion of tertiary education affects family-related behaviour: university graduates tend to postpone childbearing, highly educated women often display the lowest fertility and the highest childlessness rates. However, sometimes the link between education and fertility decisions is far from intuitive. We will present the highlights of the more and less expected findings from our wide-ranging research on the macro- and micro-level relationship between education, fertility and family. From an aggregate perspective, we will show that highly educated women do not differ in life time fertility intentions from others. However, they tend to fulfil their intentions less often, so that their ‘gap’ between the intended and the realized family size is usually the biggest. The reason for that can be purely mechanistic: staying in education leads to childbearing postponement. Thus, university graduates have simply less time to have children. On the other hand, the institutional arrangements decisive for combining family life with career (i.e. family and labour market policies) can play a crucial role as our micro-level analyses prove: the labour force participation rates among highly educated women are positively related to their short-time fertility intentions, which are not necessarily lower than those of less educated women. At the individual level, also education of the partners plays an important role in fertility decisions. Homogamous highly educated couples postpone the first birth most, but subsequently display the highest transition rates to second and third births. When looking at how parents of small children distribute paid and unpaid work between each other, it seems that highly educated couples do it more equally. However, when policies are introduced that facilitate a longer employment break, the education-specific differences fade away as highly educated mothers delay their return to work.