Expansion of Higher Education and Fertility: Specificities of the First and Second Family Generations That Completed University Studies in Brazil

Joice Vieira, Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)

It is widely accepted that investing one's youth in schooling, professional qualifications, and career building usually requires postponing fertility. It is plausible to assume that high expectations of social mobility in some cases, or the impossibility of maintaining specific consumption patterns in others, lead to a constant postponement of the project of forming a family, under the risk that in extreme cases in which expectations are not met, the family project will be aborted. With the expansion of the Brazilian university system, stories of students who are the first in their families to go to university are frequent. However, what happens to the fertility pattern of these people? Did they quickly fit into their new social group? Do they maintain characteristics characteristic of their social group of origin? Do they develop unique demographic behaviors? Using data from the social mobility module of the National Household Sample Survey of 1996 and 2014, this study aims to answer these questions by constructing classic measures of demographic analysis such as the total fertility rate, period parity progression ratios, mean age of women at childbirth, and the proportion of nulliparous women at the end of the reproductive period.

Keywords: Fertility, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Population and Development, Data and Methods

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