Growing Educational Gaps in Childlessness, Employment, and Income: Explained by Changes in Resources and Abilities Available to Less-Educated Groups?

Educational inequalities in childlessness have grown across cohorts. It remains unclear to what extent this development was driven by a decline in resources and abilities in groups with low education. Using high-quality Norwegian population registers (n=683,882 men born 1963-1991), we find that increasing educational inequalities in childlessness are mirrored by growing educational gaps in employment participation and income. Educational groups have diverged on resources (parental income rank) but converged on abilities (relative cognitive ability). Regression models show that changes in the composition of educational groups in terms of parental income explain 6%-7% of the growth in educational gaps in childlessness, employment participation and income. In contrast, gaps in life outcomes would have grown more than observed had educational groups not converged on cognitive abilities. We conclude that relative education-specific changes in financial resources and cognitive abilities explain little, if any, of the growing educational inequalities in the life outcomes studied.