Fertility and education among British Asian women: a success story of social mobility?

High fertility among immigrant groups is often analysed as an expression of specific cultural factors and/or lower social status. I hypothesise that differences in educational attainment explain the fertility differentials across immigrant groups and generations in the UK. Building on previous work, and using household survey data and the Own-Child reverse-survival method, the paper presents for the first time total fertility and age-specific fertility estimates by broad categories of educational attainment for immigrant and second-generation British Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, and Chinese women. I use these estimates to analyse how education influences childbearing across British Asian ethnic groups, and compare the fertility patterns of these groups to those of the whole UK population. High levels of educational attainment contribute substantially to…