The Impact of College Education on Fertility: Evidence for Heterogeneous Effects

CCPR-2009-017

Abstract

Despite a substantial literature on the effects of education on women's fertility, little is known about possible variation in effects by selection into college. Women’s increasing educational attainment motivates further attention to the impact of education on fertility patterns, particularly among college‐educated women who have a low likelihood of attending and completing college. With data on U.S. women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we examine effects of timely college attendance and completion by propensity score strata using a hierarchical linear model and stratum‐specific discrete‐time event‐history models. We find evidence for significant, systematic variation in effects. The fertility‐decreasing college effect is concentrated among disadvantaged women with a low propensity for college attendance and completion, approaches zero as the propensity for college increases, and then reverses to a fertility‐increasing effect among the most
advantaged women.