Education Helath Employment

Education Matters for Health Everyone knows that without a good education, prospects for a good job with good earnings are slim. Few people think of education as a crucial path to health, however. Yet a large body of evidence strongly—and, with very rare exceptions, consistently—links education with health, even when other factors like income are taken into account. 1-6 By “education” we mean educational attainment, or the years or level of overall schooling a person has, rather than instruction on specific health topics like hygiene, diet or exercise; while the quality of education also is important for health outcomes, this information is more difficult to measure and thus typically unavailable. People with more education are likely to live longer, to experience better health outcomes ), and to practice health-promoting behaviors such as exercising regularly, refraining from smoking, and obtaining timely health care check-ups and screenings. 4, 7-9 Educational attainment among adults is linked with children’s health as well, beginning early in life: babies of more-educated mothers are less likely to die before their first birthdays, and children of moreeducated parents experience better health . Education can influence health in many ways. This issue brief examines three major interrelated pathways through which educational attainment is linked with health: health knowledge and behaviors; employment and income; and social and psychological factors, including sense of control, social standing and social support. In addition, this brief explores how educational attainment affects health across generations, examining the links between parents’ education—and the social and economic advantages it represents—and their children’s health and social advantages, including opportunities for educational attainment.
Education is linked with social and psychological factors, including sense of control, social standing and social support. These factors can improve health through reducing stress, influencing health-related behaviors and providing practical and emotional support.
 • Sense of control. Education may influence health by shaping people’s sense of control—their perceptions of the extent to which they can influence their life circumstances. Several studies have concluded that more education confers a greater sense of control, which perhaps is not surprising given the influence of education on prospects for jobs and income. Higher levels of education have been linked with greater perception of personal control, fostering skills, habits and attitudes—such as problem-solving, purposefulness, self-directedness, perseverance and confidence—that contribute to people’s expectations that their own actions and behaviors shape what happens to them.45-47
 Increased sense of control in turn has been linked with health outcomes including higher levels of self-rated health, lower levels of physical impairment, and decreased risk of chronic conditions; it also has been associated with health-related behaviors including smoking, alcohol consumption, physical activity and diet.45-49
Sense of control may also influence health through job-related pathways, by affecting a person’s job seeking and performance, for example.50-52 It is important to note that an individual with a greater sense of control may also be more likely to achieve higher educational attainment, making it difficult to separate out the effects of sense of control and education on health.
• Social standing. Many experts believe that social standing is another important factor linking education with health. Along with income and occupation, educational attainment is an important determinant of where individuals rank within social hierarchies that reflect status and influence in societies. Greater educational attainment typically is associated with higher social standing, which in turn has been linked with better health status.53 An individual’s perception of where she or he ranks in a social hierarchy has been referred to as subjective social status and has been shown to powerfully predict health status even after controlling for conventional measures of socioeconomic status such as occupation, income and education.54-56
While the pathways linking it to health are not well understood, subjective social status may be a more comprehensive reflection of social and economic resources