Late, But Not Too Late? Postponement of First Birth Among Highly Educated US Women
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Late, But Not Too Late? Postponement of First Birth Among Highly Educated US Women Natalie Nitsche1 · Hannah Brückner2 Received: 10 April 2019 / Accepted: 21 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We examine the link between the postponement of parenthood and fertility outcomes among highly educated women in the USA born in 1920–1986, using data from the CPS June Supplement 1979–2016. We argue that the postponement–low fertility nexus noted in demographic and biomedical research is especially relevant for women who pursue postgraduate education because of the potential overlap of education completion, early career stages, and family formation. The results show that women with postgraduate education differ from women with college education in terms of the timing of the first birth, childlessness, and completed fertility. While the postponement trend, which began with the cohorts born in the 1940s, has continued among highly educated women in the USA, its associations with childlessness and completed parity have changed considerably over subsequent cohorts. We delineate five distinct postponement phases over the 80-year observation window, consistent with variation over time in the prevalence of strategies for combining tertiary education and employment with family formation. Keywords Fertility · Education · College · Childlessness · Postponement · First birth · Postgraduate · United States
1 Introduction Increasing educational attainment is one of the key factors characterizing social change and development over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Changes in family formation have occurred simultaneously, most notably * Natalie Nitsche [email protected] Hannah Brückner [email protected] 1
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Konrad‑Zuse Str.1, 18057 Rostock, Germany
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Division of Social Sciences, NYU-Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
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Vol.:(0123456789)
N. Nitsche, H. Brückner
the postponement of entry into parenthood to later stages of the life course, rising childlessness at older ages, and declines in total and completed cohort fertility rates (Gustafsson 2001; Cherlin 2010; Castles 2003). For instance, across OECD countries, the mean age at first birth has increased by 0.08 years per calendar year since 1970, and is now at 28 (Barclay and Myrskalä 2016). Kohler et al. (2002) argued that while this postponement of parenthood was initially a response of individuals to socioeconomic pressures and incentives, including rising returns to human capital, subsequent investment in education, rising youth unemployment, and shortages in the housing market, social feedback then reinforced the effects of these conditions through the erosion of norms about the right time to have a first child, increased uncertainty about the optimal timing of childbirth, and social feedback processes in labor and marriage markets (Kohler et al. 2002: 657). Kohler et al. called this the “postponement transition,” i.e., a permanent change of fertility regimes i
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