Fertility

Lyman Stone on fertility:

It turns out, once they are out of school, most women have very similar fertility trajectories. Regardless of their degree, once women are out of school, their odds of having a kid ramp up to about 10 to 15% a year, and it remains there until they hit their 40s, when biological limitations become significant and fertility declines (negative figures here represent generational differences in prior fertility, not lost children). In other words, the measurable effect of education on birth rates is very small, and even such effect as does exist appears to be unrelated to the actual degree obtained and more related to whether or not a person is enrolled at any level. https://ifstudies.org/blog/do-schooling-and-city-living-equal-fewer-babies

...

The fertility rate for non-enrolled women is vastly higher in all cases. Now, it is possible that becoming pregnant induces some women to accelerate degree completion and then forestalls subsequent degree-seeking, possibly distorting these statistics. But it is at least as likely that women simply postpone childbearing until they have completed their education. The result of successfully following this “success sequence,” however, is that many of these women never have the kids they want to have. Indeed, economic research has recently shown that in the U.S. and U.K. at least, most women systematically overestimate their likelihood of working in a field that will require a degree and also overestimate the number of children they are likely to have. In other words, the gender norms surrounding higher education today both place enormous pressure on women to obtain higher degrees than they are likely to use, and in turn, the time spent pursuing those degrees reduces the odds that women have as many children as they want to have.