Fertility rates plunge to decade low as researchers find biggest dip in female graduates

Female college graduates postpone having babies later than low-educated women, according to research from the University of Oxford.

Women of all backgrounds had fewer children in the past decade and did so later in life than in previous years.

But a study published today in the journal Population Studies finds that the decline was especially strong among mothers with well-educated parents who went to college themselves.

Professor John Ermisch from Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Demographic Science, who carried out the research, said: ‘Previous research has shown that education is an important indicator of a woman’s fertility.

‘While other studies have examined differences due to a woman’s education, this study is the first to combine the education of both parents with that of the woman herself.

“This helps differentiate fertility further than the education of either generation separately.”

His analysis showed that women with a low level of education, whose parents also had no higher education, had an average of 2.3 children between 2010 and 2012.

But the figure had fallen to about 1.6 in 2017-2020.

The total fertility rate of women who were highly educated like their parents fell from 1.8 to 1.4 over the same period.

And the average age at giving birth also increased over the course of the decade, from 28 to nearly 29 among the lowest educated and from 32 to nearly 33 among the highest educated.

Overall, the fertility rate in England and Wales fell from 1.94 in 2010 to 1.55 in 2021, the lowest level on record.