Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women. There are several, potentially congruent, explanations for why more education is associated with lower fertility. One explanation involves “opportunity costs”. When making family and career decisions, women weigh competing demands on their time, energy, and commitment. Demands compete because of role incompatibility between childrearing and participating in economically productive work in modern industrial society. Women with higher educational attainment and higher potential wages encounter higher opportunity costs to childbearing, yielding fertility differences by education.
Offer a second explanation for educational differentials in fertility. Women from different socioeconomic backgrounds and access to college assemble different notions of personal success.
characterize advantaged young women’s early goals, whereas childbearing marks young disadvantaged women’s social identity and achievement. The difference between advantaged and disadvantaged young women’s goals relates to opportunity costs because motherhood offers a valid social role for women who perceive “little access to the academic degrees, high-status marriages, and rewarding professions that provide many middle-and upper-class women with gratifying social identities”.
A third explanation involves the decoupling between marriage and fertility among less-educated women in contrast to the strong link between marriage and fertility among educated women. In recent decades, family patterns of women at the top of the socioeconomic order have diverged from those of women at the bottom. Highly educated women postpone parenthood as well as a marriage while less-educated women postpone only marriage.
Given patterns of educational homogamy, less-educated women are appreciably affected by the deterioration of less-educated men’s employment stability and economic prospects. When “marriageable” men are relatively scarce, (nonmarital) childbearing is a potential family-formation strategy among economically disadvantaged women. Accordingly, nonmarital births have increased dramatically among disadvantaged less-educated women contended that “marriage has become something of a luxury good” reserved for advantaged women. And as advantaged and educated women are reluctant to engage in nonmarital childbearing, the marital delay is associated with fertility delay.
Moreover, with increasing availability and acceptability of childcare, married women who are advantaged, educated, and have firmly established careers can use their higher incomes to buffer some of the time and energy costs of raising children. Insofar as employers strive to keep their most valuable employees, high-ability educated women may also effectively negotiate maternity leaves without deflecting their career trajectories.
