Demography, Family

Education and Fertility

One salient characteristic of family composition is the number of children within families. The relationship between education and fertility is one of the most studied subjects in family demography. Since the mid-20th century, demographers have documented a “demographic transition,” characterized by a long-term decline in the number of children born to women. They also noted a strong negative correlation between individual or societal fertility rates and individual or societal education, particularly women's education.

Educating girls and women is widely believed to be an effective way to reduce teen or marital fertility and to improve reproductive health. The importance of girls' and women's education was highlighted in the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where delegates urged all countries to provide universal primary education to girls and women before the year 2015. The fourth conference on women in Beijing in 1995 further reinforced the notion that educating women is an important component of female empowerment. Education empowers women so they participate in major decision making with their spouses, including reproductive decisions.

Women's empowerment is but one explanation for the decline in fertility. Economist Theodore W. Schultz promulgated the idea that formal schooling is a form of human capital, a productive element that resides in human beings and enhances one's earning power in the labor market. Therefore, education increases the cost of a woman's time spent at home, giving her incentive to trade childbearing and childrearing for gainful labor market work. Another human capital theorist, Gary S. Becker, suggested that parents engage in a quantity–quality substitution when it comes to making fertility decisions: more-educated parents demand fewer children (quantity) but invest more heavily in each child's education (quality). Educated individuals tend to be more efficient in using birth control methods and in avoiding excess fertility. Education also affects the supply of fertility through its effects on women's health, age at menarche, age at marriage, fecundity, and norms about breastfeeding. In poor countries, a slight increase in women's education improves women's health, increasing fecundity, and lowering age at menarche. As a consequence, in some developing countries women with a little education have higher fertility than illiterate women. Only when women have more than a primary education does the negative association between education and fertility become apparent. The relationship between education and fertility is by no means uniform along the educational continuum.

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