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This article focuses on educational expansion in Italy and Norway during 1870-1914. After selectively reviewing work pointing to possible links between the educational and the demographic patterns, the article examines the cases of Italy and Norway in the period 1870-1914. Particular attention is given to exploring the relationship between educational expansion at different levels and changes in marital fertility, in relative cohort size, and in levels of internal migration and emigration. Most studies of the history of education and of the determinants of enrollment patterns implicitly assume that alter allowing for the size of the relevant cohorts there is no need to consider population questions. With respect to fertility and schooling, demographers commonly treat the latter as exogenously determined and as affecting fertility through its consequences for access to modern values and to information and through its effects on the occupational structure, on urbanization and on women's roles in the family and in the labor force.