California Center for Population Research

Numerous studies of educational attainment in the United States have shown that schooling is negatively correlated with sibship size. That is, children with fewer brothers and sisters obtain more schooling than those with more siblings. Moreover, this negative relationship exists even after family socioeconomic characteristics are controlled (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Hauser and Sewell 1985; Mare and Chen 1986; Blake 1989). This finding is often explained using an argument of finite resources: parents have limited time, money, and patience to devote to the education of their children, and those with fewer children can invest more per child.