More and more women with infant children have attended some college. The news is good for their offspring. It may be bad for men who want to attend institutions of higher education. Any individual person who sits in a college class takes that set from someone else, most likely.

According Pew research on college-educated mothers:

Mothers with infant children in the U.S. today are more educated than they ever have been. In 2011, more than six-in-ten (66%) had at least some college education, while 34% had a high school diploma or less and just 14% lacked a high school diploma, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

It is worth noting that the conclusion is not unique, and much of the data collected by the Census is available online.

One question the data begs is whether women need college degrees to raise children, particularly if they do no work outside the home. Educated women may raise more literate children, although Pew does not demonstrate that.

The research firm adds:

Experts have identified a strong linkage between child well-being and maternal education levels. On average, a mother with more education is more likely to deliver a baby at term and more likely to have a baby with a healthy birth weight. As they grow up, children with more educated mothers tend to have better cognitive skills and higher academic achievement than others. It is difficult to determine whether maternal education is causing some of these outcomes, or if it is serving as a proxy for some other causal factor (for example, economic well-being). What is irrefutable, though, is that on average the more education a woman has, the better off her children will be

But, Pew does not completely make the a case on its own that is “irrefutable.”

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