Women's education and fertility are often thought of as enemies. Both school itself, and the better-paying jobs it prepares one for, can make it harder to prioritize having children. Here in the U.S., women with no high-school diploma have roughly twice the fertility of women with an associate’s degree or more.
But has Finland flipped the script? A new working paper, released through the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, raises the possibility but leaves much unclear.
The Basic Trendlines
To American readers not versed in international fertility statistics, the simple trends in the following chart—breaking down whether women had kids according to their education and birth year—might be the most striking finding in the whole study. (For reference, “secondary” education lasts three years in Finland, and “tertiary” education goes beyond that.)
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Institute for Family Studies
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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