Social Stratification and Health: Education's Benefit beyond Economic Status and Social Origins

Abstract

Stratification research has established education's critical role in the intergenerational transmission of parental socioeconomic status to adult work and economic status. However, almost no research examines the intergenerational processes by which socioeconomic origins affect adult physical and psychological well-being. Furthermore, stratification theories disagree on whether education endows people with meaningful skills, or whether education merely represents a symbolic marker used to pass on socioeconomic advantage from one generation to the next. Using data from the 1987-1988 National Survey of Families and Households and the 1995 Aging, Status, and the Sense of Control Survey, we compare the effects of social origins, education, work, and economicstatus on physical and psychological well-being. Education is one of the strongest predictors of both physical and psychological well-being in both surveys, and its effects are not spuriously due to socioeconomic origins. Education has positive effects on well-being beyond the access it provides to privileged positions in the economy and higher incomes. People from high and low statuses benefit from more years of education. Finally, effects of parental education, father's occupation, and childhood poverty on adult well-being are largely mediated by respondent's education and its consequences for work and economic resources. However, some aspects of social origins, especially the experience of poverty in childhood, continue to affect adult well-being even accounting for one's own socioeconomic status.