Education and Future Fertility Trends, with Special Reference to Mid-transitional Countries

Of all the indicators of socio-economic status, schooling has been most widely used by demographers. Education of adults persistently emerges as the single most powerful predictor of their demographic behaviour. Thus, length of schooling is associated with the start of reproductive life (age at marriage and maternity), with childbearing and the use of birth control, and with mortality. Until the late 1970s, the pervasive influence of educational background of individuals and couples on a range of demographic outcomes was thought by many researchers to reflect the close link between extent of formal schooling and material circumstances; schooling was typically taken to be an indicator of socioeconomic status, and interest in its association with fertility and mortality was correspondingly diluted. The turning point was the publication of results from a survey in Nigeria that showed the schooling of mothers to be a more powerful predictor of child survival than economic characteristics of the family, such as the father's occupation (Caldwell, 1979) together with an extensive review of the educationalfertility relationships that came to similar conclusions (Cochrane, 1979). Subsequent research has confirmed that the schooling of the mother is generally a more decisive influence on reproduction than characteristics of the father.