Access to Higher Education and Adolescent Fertility in Chile.

This study investigates gender differences in the association between adolescent fertility and the likelihood of initiating higher education among young Chilean men and women. We adopt an entropy balancing strategy to estimate the association between adolescent fertility and the likelihood of starting higher education while accounting for potential selection into early childbearing due to socioeconomic status and prior academic achievement. We use data from official national registers that cover a cohort of Chilean students who attended publicly funded schools and who successfully completed secondary schooling between 2011 and 2022. Our results indicate that adolescent mothers are 15 percentage points less likely to initiate higher education than their peers who did not give birth during adolescence. In comparison, teenage fathers are 20 percentage points less likely to do so than their childless counterparts. Our findings stand in contrast to previously identified disadvantage patterns for secondary school completion, whereby adolescent fertility more significantly hinders schooling completion for women relative to men. We contend that this reversal may be related to traditional gender-role expectations in Chile, which encourage young fathers to act as providers and, therefore, may be prevented from continuing on their education path into tertiary studies.

Gender differences in high-school dropout: Vulnerability and adolescent fertility in Chile.

The original concerns about the consequences of adolescent fertility assumed that pregnancy is a turning point, which altered teens' life trajectories in terms of school progress, human capital accumulation and labor force participation, placing them on a path of vulnerability. However, several years of research have shown that teenagers who become pregnant are not a random sample of the population, but a selective sample, more likely to have limited socioeconomic resources and other characteristics that made them a vulnerable group to begin with. This paper studies the association between adolescent fertility and high school dropout in Chile taking that selectivity in consideration. We analyze the dropout of teen men and women, considering their socioeconomic status, sociodemographic characteristics, and characteristics of their sexual debut. Data comes the VIII Chilean Survey of the Youth, a nationally representative survey of people 15-29 years old applied in 2015. In order to deal with selectivity issues, we use a combination of propensity score weighting techniques and adjusted generalized linear models for estimating the effect of teen parenthood on high school dropout (ATT), for men and women separately. Our best estimates of the effect of teen parenting on the probability of high school dropout is 16-18 percent for women and ten percent for men, which implies that the educational setback of parenthood for women is about twice as high as the setback of men. These findings suggest the need of policies and interventions aimed both to reduce adolescent fertility, but also to facilitate the high school completion of those who already are parents.