For more than a century, education has been a pathway to getting a good job. Before then it was a sign of elite pedigree, and before then it fueled the growth of organized religions. Today, with the changing nature of work and people living longer and healthier, it may be our ticket to keeping up, adapting to the new challenges, maintaining a personal safety net and taking advantage of new opportunities that were beyond our imagination when we were children, adolescents, or even young adults. If so, we will need education more than ever. But what is it about education that we will need?
Over the past decade and a half, I’ve had a chance to study this question using survey data from about 45,000 people who were, for the most part, born during the Baby Boom, first interviewed in high school, and who are now retiring. Some graduated from high school the year The Godfather was the top grossing film, and others were first interviewed when Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back held that honor. Telephones connected to landlines, students learned typing not keyboarding, and manufacturing and secretarial jobs paid a living wage. Just over a fifth of National Longitudinal Survey of 1972 sample members, who graduated from high school in 1972 and are now around age 72, earned a college degree by their mid-twenties. About the same share of the sample members of the High School and Beyond 1980 study, who graduated in 1980 or 1982 and are now between ages 62 and 64, completed a baccalaureate degree as young adults. In recent interviews, almost half of both cohorts reported that they are in very good or excellent health, and many have a decade or more of good health in their future. They’ll bring their education with them on the journey.
As my collaborators and I found, those who had taken more advanced and challenging courses in high school, scored better on achievement tests, and earned higher grades live longer, are healthier, show signs of slower aging, and have much better cognitive functioning around ages 60 and 70. These results suggest that the value of education goes far beyond the canonical idea that education gets you a better job. It’s true that education usually leads to better jobs, higher wages, and generally contributes to economic security. But in our research, we’ve seen that even people who stop out of the labor force, take a lower paying job, or leave the labor force altogether still reap lifelong benefits from quality education.
Why? We have some hypotheses which, if correct, can provide us all with principles that apply equally well to Boomers and Zoomers.
The first may seem self-evident: A quality education positions people to grasp abstract concepts, be curious and inquisitive, and to love to learn. This better positions them to make informed decisions, find more than one solution to a problem, reason through problems they have never seen, and adapt to new challenges. These skills in turn not only protect people from the worst effects of technological change, but they also appear to protect their cognitive functioning as they age.
Take the Baby Boomers’ experiences in work and everyday life in the late 20th century, which was completely transformed by technology. Some of the first evidence my collaborators and I saw for the value of education was that study participants who took more challenging high school coursework, especially in math and science, adapted better when their jobs (like “typist” or “switchboard operator”) were replaced by technology. It wasn’t just that they found new jobs, though they did, for example in the health care and computer sectors.
Strikingly, the advantages of education filtered into other realms of life. Not only was the self-reported health of people who had taken more challenging courses markedly better than that of students who hadn’t taken similar coursework, they were also less likely to die early, and they suffered from fewer preventable or treatable conditions such as high blood pressure, stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. These health outcomes are beneficial on their own, but those preventable or treatable conditions are also linked to cognitive health outcomes in later life. Altogether, we’ve been able to predict cognitive functioning around age 60 with about 70% accuracy using mainly education information from childhood, high school, and early adulthood.
A few short decades after computer technology and the internet transformed work and life for previous generations, AI is now threatening to change every aspect of Zoomer’s march into later life. Although the technology is different, the challenges may be consistent. So too may be the lifelong benefits of a good education. Our research leads us to believe that young people today who have access to higher quality education will be similarly resilient in the face of uncertainty. They’ll be better positioned to adapt to a changing world than those who have not developed the skills to problem solve, take on challenge, think abstractly, and find multiple solutions to a problem — what learning scientists might refer to as higher order thinking skills.
When my collaborators and I used our data to look to the past to gain insights into our futures, we were surprised to find that over the last few decades people are using higher education differently. Adults are returning to the classroom in unprecedented numbers. Nearly two-thirds of our sample returned to school in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, and they will likely continue the trend into their 70s. Although many of us hold a traditional notion that people finish school, then get a job, then have a family, our research found that people are following different pathways.
Many adults in our study samples used school to continue to learn and fulfill long-held aspirations. Some finally got the degree they planned to get when they were teenagers. Others went back for a second or third credential, or maybe to just learn something new. Altogether, over 40% of our sample earned a new degree in midlife. When they did, they got similar returns to their education that those who benefited earlier experienced. Even people who had a bumpy road out of high school and returned to school in midlife to finally complete college or graduate education had better outcomes. Cognitive functioning was better for people who completed higher education at any point compared to those who did not have as much education. Those with higher education also had better health outcomes: Indicators of healthy aging — cardiovascular and metabolic health and cognitive functioning —were better for those who completed higher education, even if they finished their degrees later in life.
In our research, we’ve used statistical techniques to account for selection factors, such as family background, resources, and area of the country, that might contribute to both getting more education and having the improved outcomes. Even so, it is impossible to be certain that education causes the better outcomes. What is certain is that it’s never too late to learn, grow, and improve the quality of our lives.
In a nutshell, education slows the pace of aging. It’s about learning to reason, continuing to change and grow, controlling what you can, and adapting to the rest. It’s about building strength and resilience through agency. Education is much more than just a degree or a piece of paper in a frame on the wall. It is a ticket to learn, approach challenge, avoid problems, stay engaged, and keep up — not be left behind — in our rapidly changing and uncertain world.
Chandra Muller is a sociologist at The University of Texas at Austin, where she holds both the Alma Cowden Madden Centennial Professorship and the Ashbel Smith Professorship, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research is on how schools and education shape inequalities in later life work, health, and cognitive aging, and she is currently leading (with collaborators Eric Grodsky and Rob Warren) two nationally representative, longitudinal studies — the High School and Beyond (HS&B) and the National Longitudinal Study of the Class of 1972 (NLS-72). You can learn more about this work at https://edshareproject.org/