Does Having An Education Make You Any Happier?
A new study suggests the number of degrees you have may not actually matter to your mental well-being. (Photo: Flickr/John Liu)
Education may further your career and earning potential, but will it also increase your chances of finding true happiness? Not exactly, say researchers from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom.
According a new British Journal of Psychiatry study analyzing socioeconomic factors and mental well-being, researchers discovered that education level has nothing to do with how content people are in life.
In other words: A person with a limited amount of education has the same odds of having “high mental well-being” — a term defined in the study as feeling good and functioning well — as someone with a degree (or two or three).
Researchers also found that African and African-Caribbean, Indian, and Pakistani men in particular had increased odds of experiencing high mental well-being.
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“[W]e expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing,” lead author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown said in a statement. “So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental well-being. But that is not the case.”
However, psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal, MD, who was not involved in the new study, says the findings actually aren’t all that surprising. “The basic finding that socioeconomic status is not correlated with happiness is consistent with all of the past literature,” he tells Yahoo Health. “One thing we need to remember is that those people who are classified as mentally ill are only a small proportion of the population. And even among the lowest of the socioeconomic classes, they’re not mostly mentally ill — they’re mostly well.”
He feels this study leads to the more interesting question: Why aren’t those of lower socioeconomic status less happy? “Study after study has shown that once you’ve got your basic needs covered, extra money does not correlate with more happiness,” he says. “Happiness can be derived from many things, including family, friends, religion, having a sense of community, and a sense of purpose, which are all perfectly accessible to people of low socioeconomic status.”
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Rosenthal adds that the researchers have made their study “a little confusing” by including mental illness, low socioeconomic status, and unhappiness. “Surely mental illness will be associated with unhappiness, and mental illness is correlated with lower socioeconomic status because those who are mentally ill are less able to make a living,” he says. “But again, the fact is that’s only a small percent of the population.”
And then there’s another factor associated with happiness — the genetic component. “In this study, they mention certain ethnic groups that seem happier,” Rosenthal says. “The reason: They may have more cohesive social groups that keep them happier, [and] they may have a more tight-knit community. But they also be genetically better equipped for happiness.”
