Why educated people have less children

In the world of conservative news, it would seem that poor people are sucking the government dry while overpopulating the country with paupers and criminals. Meanwhile, to others—admittedly the set I'm more familiar with—children are seen as the accessories of the narcissistic elite, and rich people are having more kids.

The facts, though, are that poor women have more children and women with more children are poorer , and that the fertility rates of more-educated women are rising , not falling. Fact 1: Women with less education in the U. From U. Census Bureau data , we know that, among women who were finishing their childbearing years ages in , those with less than a high school degree had borne the most children 2. Last's comment that "Women who go to college or graduate school are unlikely to have even two children" seems to follow from the fact that college graduates have an average of 1.

Because about one in every five college graduates have no children, we only get to an average 1. But this does not mean that, "The bearing and raising of children has largely become the province of the lower classes. So here is the distribution of children according to their mothers' education level, next to the distribution of women:. You can see that women with the least education did have more kids than their share of the population: 14 percent versus 10 percent.

But there were twice as many children born to women who were college graduates. So women with higher education are almost doing their share in producing the workers of the future. When it comes to childbearing, in other words, the highly educated are almost pulling their weight. Fact 2: Educational disparities in fertility rates are decreasing. Among women reaching the end of their childbearing years, the last 15 years have seen a decline in the disparity I just described.

Completed fertility rates have increased for those with more education, and decreased for those with less, from to Remember that, even though their fertility rates are quite high, high school dropouts represent only 10 percent percent of women ages 40 to To be sure: There are a lot of different ways of measuring fertility rates.

I'm using completed fertility—the number of children even born to women who reach the age at which childbearing becomes rare the census defined this as ages 35 to 44 until , and ages 40 to44 since. And this shows women with less education having more children.

Women in the general population with higher adult income have fewer children, but this relationship does not hold within all educational groups, including our sample with elite educations.

Higher-income men, however, do not have fewer children in the general population and in fact have lower childlessness rates.

Further, higher income in men is positively associated with fertility among our sample with elite educations as well as within the general population among those with college educations. Babies take a lot of effort and attention, particularly if you want to raise them the way you were raised, being one of a small number of children in your own well-educated family.

Birth control is expensive. For many people, these costs are trivial, but for the poor, birth control can be too expensive to purchase. But people really like practicing the baby-making process, so getting them to abstain is really hard to do. Among the poor, certain kinds of drug use are more prevalent. These forms of drug use can lead to increased pregnancy rates from prostitution for drugs and impaired judgement from drugs. Wealthier, well-educated families are more likely to have 2 parents in the home.

Research suggests that children of single parents are more likely to have early pregnancies, and this probably leads to overall higher rates of pregnancy. Many educated people meet their partners in or after college. Some high-end careers, like doctors and lawyers, almost always require a late pregnancy due to the massive time constraints early on for people in those highly-educated fields.