Fertility among educated, never-married white women

In the recent post on the fertility of never-married women, Audacious Epigone suggested I look at trends over time. I calculated the mean number of offspring for white women ages 40 to 59 who completed at least 16 years of education:


Mean number of offspring

Fifties .00
Sixties .00
Seventies .00
Eighties .14
Nineties .16
Aughts .14
This decade .18

From the 50s through the 70s, educated, never-married white women had no children. Since that time, perhaps one out of six has a single child. The trend suggests that if all educated white women never got married, the numbers of educated white Americans would dwindle rapidly.

This graph shows trends in marital status among educated white women:

Singlehood among educated white women has been increasing for several decades but is still short of twenty percent.