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Total birthrate for women aged 20-49

South Koreans with less-educated backgrounds are getting married less often and having fewer children, a new study shows. As a society’s fertility rate declines, highly educated women tend to have fewer children, but the decrease in the birth rate for women with less education (and thus lower income levels) is an apparent result of the increasing cost of bearing and raising children.

According to a report called “An Analysis of Birth, Death, Marriage and Divorce by Educational Level: 2000-2015” that was published by Statistics Korea on May 23, the decrease in the birth rate since the 2000s has become more pronounced among women with lower levels of education. As recently as 2000, women between the ages of 20 and 49 with at least a university degree had a total fertility rate of 1.48, which was lower than women with just a high school diploma (1.51). But in 2015, the total fertility rate had declined to 1.32 for women with at least a university degree but just 1.02 for women who had only graduated from high school.

“There’s an old stereotype that an increasing number of women with advanced decrees and professional jobs is the main cause of the low birth rate, but we’ve confirmed that that stereotype doesn‘t reflect reality. The reason we compared educational levels is because academic achievement is an indirect indicator of income level, and this study appears to show that the primary factor affecting marriage and childbirth is financial status,” Statistics Korea said.

Educational level also has a considerable influence on marriage. In 2015, the marriage rate (the number of marriages per 1,000 people) for men at least 20 years old and with at least a university degree was 24.5, and 28.6 for women. This plunged to 9.8 for men and 10 for women among high school graduates and 3.6 for men and 2.3 for women among middle school graduates and below. There were also more divorces among high school graduates than among university graduates. While the 2015 divorce rate for those with at least a university degree was 4.4 for both men and women, the rate among high school graduates was 6.4 for men and 7.5 for women. The study found that male and female high school graduates in their thirties were getting divorced at rates that were 2.2 and 2.7 times higher, respectively, than university graduates.

When a society’s birth rate begins to fall, it’s typical for the rate to decline among highly educated and high-earning women because of the opportunity cost of having and raising children. But even after becoming a low-fertility society, South Korea is witnessing a sharp decrease in the birth rate, especially among women who only graduated from high school. “Rather than the issue of the opportunity cost involved in giving birth and raising children, the costs incurred while giving birth and raising children have become too great for low income earners to bear, and decreasing income has wiped out their capacity to have children,” said Cho Young-tae, professor of health demography at Seoul National University.

By Heo Seung, staff reporter

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