What The Research Says
- To the extent that education promotes continued social participation, lifelong learning can have a significant benefit on happiness, especially among cohorts who might otherwise be socially isolated.
- Life Long Learning appears to lead to superior mental health outcomes and emotional resilience by improving self esteem and self efficacy, along with health literacy the benefits are more general.
- Evidence seems to point to continuing training and life long learning having a positive impact on wages for the already employed, especially when training and improving basic skills.
- Training in financial literacy appears to have a net positive effect on wealth outcomes and poverty reduction. Especially at lower skill levels, continued education contributes to higher levels of employeablity.
- Life Long Learning’s biggest effects seem to be for the aging and for those with lower overall levels of “base” education (< Bachelors).
- There is some moderating evidence that very high levels of education can lead to lower levels of happiness and subjective well being.
References
- Enriched Environment’s Help Prevent Dementia: The Brain Health Benefits of Lifelong Learning (American Society on Aging)
- Impacts of lifelong learning upon emotional resilience, psychological and mental health: fieldwork evidence (Oxford Review of Education)
- The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Poverty Reduction (Niace)
- The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Wellbeing and Happiness (Niace)
The Choices
School Centric – Your deep academic experience and learned observations have proven to you time and time again that excess education is for poopy heads.
Score: No Change
Life Long – If your nose isn’t buried in a book, you’re reading pretentious, vaguely academic websites like this one that tells you that you should spend more time with your nose buried in books.
Score: +1 Wealth, +1 Happiness, +1 Health