The Relationship Between College Education & Health

该项目的目的是研究大学教育与健康之间的关系，最终目标是了解如何利用教育政策来塑造健康结果。虽然教育程度和健康之间的正相关关系已经得到了很好的确立，但很少有证据表明这种关系是否代表教育对健康的因果关系。本研究的主要目的是评估教育-特别是大学教育-对各种健康结果和行为的因果影响。为此，将在评估一项新的独特教育干预措施-“打开大门”实验-时增加一个健康部分。Opening Doors将为四所社区学院的4，400名经济上处于不利地位的年轻人提供财政援助，指导和课程改进，所有这些都旨在提高教育水平。大约3，600个控件将不会获得计划福利，但将随着时间的推移进行跟踪。将个人随机分为治疗组和对照组将有可能确定教育程度对健康结果和行为的因果影响。Opening Doors研究已经计划在基线、干预12个月后以及后续日期收集参与者的教育和劳动力市场信息。我们建议在基线调查和12个月调查中增加健康模块，收集有关健康行为（如吸烟、体育活动、吸毒和酗酒）以及身心健康结果的信息。这些数据将用于评估干预措施如何在短期内影响健康和健康行为。我们还将研究初始健康如何影响大学的进展，以及干预是否改善了初始健康对教育成就的不利影响。此外，我们将使用国家青少年健康纵向研究（Add Health）的观察数据进行一组平行分析。Opening Doors和Add Health的结果比较将提供有关使用观察性数据而不是随机数据所产生的偏见的信息。最后，我们希望这项研究是一个项目的第一步，该项目将在未来评估教育干预对开门参与者长期健康结果的影响。

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.