Demography of Education

Catalog description

The major topic of the course is the impacts of education, especially college education, on various kinds of family behavior such as dating, cohabitation, living arrangements, marriage, fertility, parenting, divorce, and remarriage. In many countries, some family behaviors, if not all, are increasingly differentiated between college-educated and non-college-educated. For instance, increase in divorce is more evident among the less educated than their more educated counterparts, while marriage decline is more substantial among the less educated. Although parents’ time and money investments in children’s education have generally increased over time for both college-educated and non-college-educated parents, the increase is much more substantial among college-educated parents than their non-college-educated counterparts, leading to divergence. In such societies, college education has increasingly differentiated population with respect to family behavior, which has important implications for inequality of children’s well-being. Of course, such diverging family behavior is not observed every society. In some countries, educational differentiation in family behavior is minimal. In this course, students first will be able to have a global perspective on education and family behavior by reviewing empirical evidence of the relationship between education and various kinds of family behavior across a variety of countries. After learning how different measurements and methods are used to identify the relationship between education and family behavior, Students will be able to evaluate how empirical evidence is robust. Second, students will learn about different theories that explain why education has specific relationships with family behavior. Finally, students will have an opportunity to conduct their own research (in the format of either an empirical or a review paper) by…