Highly educated women having more children.

• Position: YOUR LIFE - Brief article

A greater number of highly educated women in their late 30s and 40s are deciding to have kids--a turnaround from recent history, indicates a study published in the Journal of Population Economics. Among college-educated females, childlessness peaked in the late 1990s, when about 30% had no offspring, but childlessness declined about five percentage points between 1998 and 2008.

"We may be seeing the beginning of a new trend," notes economist Bruce Weinberg, coauthor of the study. "One of the major economic stories of the second half of the 20th century was that highly educated women were working more and having fewer children. It is too early to definitively say that trend is over, but there is no doubt we have seen fertility rise among older, highly educated women"'

The turnaround in fertility especially is surprising because other trends --particularly lower rates of marriage--would tend to keep more women from becoming mothers.

The study shows that college-graduate women born in the late 1950s were the turning point. They were less likely to have children than previous cohorts up...