A large number of studies have investigated the relationship between education and fertility, but the majority has focused only on a single country in a specific time period. As a consequence, research has not yet produces any clear conclusions regarding trends in the educational gradient. The use of meta-analysis represents a solution to this conundrum because it offers a clear and systematic way of comparing, synthesizing and harmonizing the empirical evidence obtained by different studies.

In order to implement a meta-analysis, we sampled a large number of scientific contributions related to Western European Countries (and the US) over the past century aimed at testing the association between women’s level of education and fertility. We then constructed a dataset containing comparable results across time and countries.

From this analysis it emerges very clearly that the sign of the relationship between education and the probability of having a second child continues to exhibit the classic pattern in Mediterranean and Continental Countries (with the exception of France): higher educated women still have a lower likelihood of second birth parity progression and higher probabilities of being childless compared with less educated women. Our analyses seem to confirm that a turn-around in the educational gradient has (partly) occurred in the Nordic Countries and France. There, higher educated women appear more likely to have a second child and less likely to remain childless compared to less educated women. Interestingly, these are the very same countries where highly educated women not only have higher parity progression rates but also where completed fertility tends to be relatively high overall.