A new study has revealed that childbearing impedes education more than education impedes childbearing, especially in the case of Norwegian women.
The researchers followed all the women born in Norway in 1964 through the end of their childbearing, and used year-by-year data on education, enrollment and reproduction.
“We did this study in Norway because that’s where we could get such beautiful data, not because that’s where there’s a big problem,” said Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The researchers were expecting that women around 40 years of age with more education would bear fewer children, mainly because education reduces childbearing.
They were, however, surprised to find that women having children early seem not to go for higher education in more cases than instances of higher education reducing childbearing.
“These results suggest that women with advanced degrees have lower completed fertility on the average principally because women who have one or more children early are more likely to leave or not enter long educational tracks and never attain a high educational level,” he added.
The study findings are reported online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Tags: Higher Education, Study