The Relationship Between College Education & Health

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The aim of this project is to study the relationship between college education and health, with the ultimate goal of understanding how educational policy can be used to shape health outcomes. Although the positive association between educational attainment and health is well established, there is little evidence on whether this association represents a causal effect of education on health. The primary purpose of this study is to assess the causal effects of education--specifically college education--on a variety of health outcomes and behaviors. This will be accomplished by adding a health component to an assessment of a new and unique education intervention, the Opening Doors experiment. Opening Doors will provide 4,400 economically disadvantaged young adults in four community colleges with financial assistance, mentoring and curricular enhancements, all aimed at increasing levels of educational attainment. Approximately 3,600 controls will not receive program benefits but will be followed over time. Randomization of individuals into treatment and control groups will make it possible to identify the causal effects of educational attainment on health outcomes and behaviors. The Opening Doors study is already planning to collect education and labor market information on participants at baseline, 12 months into the intervention, and at later follow-up dates. We propose here to add health modules to the baseline and 12-month surveys, which will collect information on health behaviors (e.g. smoking, physical activity, drug and alcohol use) and physical and mental health outcomes. These data will be used to assess how the intervention affects health and health behaviors in the short run. We will also study how initial health affects progression through college and whether the intervention ameliorates adverse effects of initial health on educational attainment. In addition, we will conduct a set of parallel analyses using observation data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). A comparison of results from Opening Doors and Add Health will provide information on biases that result from the use of observational rather than randomized data. Finally, we hope this research is a first step in a project that will, in the future, assess the effects of the educational intervention on longer-run health outcomes of Opening Doors participants.