Teen Mothers Forgotten: The Gap Between High School and Higher Education

Though the national teen birth rate has declined since 1991, teen motherhood is still associated with educational and lifetime disparities among women who give birth at ages 15-19. Using the Understanding America Study data, I examine teen mothers’ educational and financial outcomes with nearest-neighbor matching. My sample is 1,335 mothers with 118 teen mothers, and I define teen mothers as mothers who had children at 15-17 years old. Compared to mothers who did not have children at ages 15-17, I find marginal significance that teen mothers are less likely to graduate high school at 10 percentage points less. More significantly, I find teen mothers to be 32 percentage points less likely to have an associate degree and 25 percentage points less likely to have a Bachelor’s Degree, both at the 99% confidence level. Moreover, teen mothers are 15 percent more likely to live in poverty. These results imply a need for more support for teen mothers to complete higher education degrees beyond high school.