bearing children at all, or fewer numbers of children. And the fact that the number of women getting higher education has increased has contributed to fewer of them getting married younger, if at all. In the US, for example, females make up more than half of all college students, which is a reversal from a few decades back. The relationship between higher education and childbearing varies by country: for example, in Switzerland by age 40, childlessness among women who had completed tertiary education is 40%, while in France it is only 15%. In some countries, childlessness has a longer tradition, and was common even before educational levels increased, but in others, such as Southern European ones, it is a recent phenomenon; for instance in Spain the childlessness rate for women aged 40–44 in 2011 was 21.60%, but historically throughout the 20th century it was around 10%. Not all countries show a relationship between low fertility and education: in Czech Republic, of women born in 1961–1965, low educated women were more likely to be childless than high educated women. In the United States in 2019, women with a graduate or professional degree had the highest birthrate (61 births per 1,000 women), whereas women with less than a high school graduate had the lowest birthrate (34 births per 1,000 women) among all levels of educational attainment of the mother. Economic fluctuation The growth of wealth and human development are related to sub-replacement fertility, although a sudden drop in living conditions, such as the great depression, can also lower fertility. In Eastern European countries, the fall of communism was followed by an economic collapse in many of these countries in the 1990s. Some countries, such as those that experienced violent conflicts in the 1990s, were badly affected. Large numbers of people lost their jobs, and massive unemployment, lack of jobs outside the big cities, and economic uncertainty discourages people from having children. For instance, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the total fertility rate in 2016 was only 1.28 children born/woman. Urbanization Some consider the increase of urbanization around the world a central cause. In recent times, residents of urban areas tend to have fewer children than people in rural areas. The need for extra labour from children on farms does not apply to urban-dwellers. Cities tend to have higher property prices, making a large family more expensive, especially in those societies where each child is now