FERTILITY INTENTIONS OF UNIVERSITY GRADUATES

ABSTRACT: Increasing numbers of young people enter university-level programmes and the share of university graduates among today’s young adults is expected to be around 40 per cent in OECD countries. Education-specific studies reveal differences in fertility behaviour. Childlessness is a particularly widespread phenomenon among female university graduates in Western Germany4 and Austria, and highly educated women are less likely to have larger families with three or more children. Based on the Generations and Gender Survey (GSS), we study fertility intentions of university gradu-ates. We concentrate on university degree holders aged 27 to 40 years in Western Ger-many and Austria, and compare them with their peers in France and Norway. We aim to find out how different life domains are associated with the intention to have a child within the next three years. We identify determinants of fertility intentions based on the concept of the life course and inspired by the concept of the rush hour of life. We exam-ine associations between employment and relationship on the one hand, and plans to start a family on the other. We analyse the extent to which the current individual situa-tion in the life domains of work and partnership and their durations are related t