Non-graduates, graduates at par on happiness index, says study

MELBOURNE - University degrees can’s buy happiness, claims a new study.

Despite having privileged backgrounds and higher earnings, people in their 20s with higher degrees are not happier than the young adults who dropped out of high school at the age of 10, the research shows.

The study observed a group of 13,600 students with nine year of education for over 11 years until they were aged 25 and found that youngsters destined for university graduation were happier than their peers during their school and university years.

However, once in jobs, around the age 22 or 23, their levels of self-reported happiness dropped markedly.

“Are these the best years of their lives (in school and university) with which later life experiences never quite compared?” asked Mike Dockery, who teaches economics at Curtin University in Australia.

The situation was reversed for young adults who had done an apprenticeship or traineeship, the study found. In school they were not so happy but the good times started once they were in training. By the age 25 they were at least as happy as the graduates, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.

“University graduates, given their circumstances, nice homes, better jobs, more money, should be happier but they’re not,” said Dockery, author of the study Education and Happiness in the school-to-work transition.

Dcokery said the reason why more education fails to make people happier might be that the more intellectually inclined are “less happy but on a higher plane”. Or it might be that graduates in their mid-20s are near the bottom of the pecking order at work, and compare their circumstances unfavourably to better-paid colleagues.

“Maybe they had unrealistic expectations of being hotshots,” Dockery said, adding that apprenticeships, on the other hand, give young people a realistic idea of working life.

The young people used a four-point scale to rate their happiness in many domains from work to the state of the economy. Dockery said though the findings did not constitute an argument against university education.

“Graduates say they’re less happy but that doesn’t mean their life is not better. And we don’t know what will happen next”.

But it is an argument against parents forcing children into university if their aptitude lay elsewhere, he said.