Ruut Veenhoven
Optentia Newsletter 14 (2) p 26
For a worthwhile existence It is generally assumed that doing well in school will add to your happiness in later life. There is much indirect evidence for that belief, such as that higher educated people earn more income, have better marriage changes, are healthier and live longer. Yet, in my reviews of empirical happiness research I saw mostly low correlations between level of school education and happiness. Together with colleagues from Portugal, I checked that impression in a synthesis of 86 research findings available in the World Database of Happiness. We found a small average zero-order correlation (r = +0.09) and much variation (SD = 0.13). This small correlation was wiped away in multi-variate analyses that control for possible indirect effects of school-education, such as income. So, school-education as such does not seem to add to happiness. This non-effect fits the result of my earlier synthesis of research on the relation between happiness and IQ, where smart people appeared to be no happier than dummies. Note that IQ is a main outcome of school education. In that study on happiness and IQ I distinguished between the micro level of individuals and the macro level of nations and found a strong relation at the latter level: “Smartness of all pays more (happiness) than being smarter than others”. We applied the same analysis on school-education, comparing average education and average happiness across 147 nations. We found a strong positive relationship: r = +0.59. A plausible explanation for the positive effect of education on average happiness in nations is that an educated population of required for the functioning of modern societies, with their high division of labor, and that people live happier in modern societies. It is less easy to understand why education hardly adds to the happiness of higher educated personally. Since there are evident positive effects, such as the higher income mentioned above, there must be negative effects which balance the out. It is a task for further research to identify these negative effects.
Leite, Â., Costa, A., Dias, P.C., Veenhoven, R. (2024). Education and happiness: lower at the micro level of individuals than at the macro level of nations. In: Magalhães, L., Ferreira Lopes, M.J., Nobre, B., Onofre Pinto, J.C. (eds) Humanistic Perspectives in Happiness Research. Happiness Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham