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Having a college degree can certainly boost your chances of getting a lucrative job. But does it actually make your happier? Well a new study says that your level of happiness is not really affected by the number of degrees you earn. The study, published by the British Journal of Psychiatry, revealed that whether you studied a university programme or not, the prospects of your happiness and mental well-being remains more or less the same.
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Does education make you happier?
The researchers of the University of Warwick in the UK analysed a number of socioeconomic factors and found that level of education has no relation with how happy they are in real life. A press release stated that the Warwick Medical School researchers were initially inspired to conduct the study by the prominent relation between mental illness and poor education. Hence, they planned to evaluate if the relation held true in the opposite way. However, they discovered that the chances of someone's happiness are equal across every level of academic accomplishment.
Lead author on the study, Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown, said “These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental well being. 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.”
According to researchers happiness is regarded as a state of high mental well-being where individuals “feel good and function well.” This was applied to data available from Health Survey for England that included 17,030 people from 2010 to 2011. Professor Stewart-Brown believes that these finding point that socioeconomic factors are probably not applicable to programmes targeted at improving mental well-being.
Happiness comes from many things, not just education
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However, according to psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal, MD, the finding of the new research was rather obvious. Although he was not involved in the study, he said “The basic finding that socioeconomic status is not correlated with happiness is consistent with all of the past literature. 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.”
Rosenthal believes the study raises a number of important questions like why people from lower socioeconomic status are equally happy. He added “Study after study has shown that once you’ve got your basic needs covered, extra money does not correlate with more happiness. 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.”
According to Rosenthal the study was made rather confusing by the researchers by considering unhappiness, low socioeconomic status and mental illness. He said “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. But again, the fact is that’s only a small percent of the population.”
What do you think about the study? Does your college degree make you feel happier? Share your thoughts and experiences with us by commenting in the box below.
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