Educational tracking and fertility

Understanding how education policies influence fertility behavior may reveal how education can shape population trends. However, the long-term demographic effects of structural reforms, such as school tracking – separating students into vocational or academic paths – remain underexplored. This study uses Finnish population register data to evaluate the fertility responses to a Finnish comprehensive school reform implemented in the 1970s that offers a unique opportunity to study completed fertility over the entire lifespan. The reform replaced the existing two-track system with a uniform nine-year comprehensive school, thereby delaying the age at which pupils are selected into vocational and academic tracks. Adopting a difference-in-differences method that is robust to heterogeneous effect and multiple treatment timing, this study explores the time-varying dynamic impact of the reform. The findings indicate increased lifetime childlessness and delayed age at first birth. The reform was also associated with higher educational attainment and reduced prevalence of vocational tracks. Further analysis suggests that the greater childlessness and delayed childbearing were likely driven by weaker early-life labor market performance following non-vocational education. This paper contributes to the literature on the education-fertility nexus by showing that education policies that delay tracking age and reduce emphasis on vocational education may unexpectedly shape the fertility landscape. Keywords: fertility, education policy, educational tracking, early-life employment