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发帖数: 8550 | 1 NEW YORK — People with too little education to meet their needs are known
to be at increased risk of certain mental health problems, but now a new
study suggests that too much education may also have detrimental effects on
mental health.
People in the study who were "overeducated" — who had more years of
education than their jobs required — were at an increased risk of
depression, the researchers said.
The study analyzed information from more than 16,600 employed people ages 25
to 60 in 21 countries in Europe. Researchers measured participants' levels
of depression based on their answers to survey questions, and presented
their results here Saturday (Aug. 10) at the American Sociological
Association meeting.
The reason overeducated people may have an increased risk of mental distress
could be because, by definition, they are not challenged by their jobs, and
cannot use all of the skills they acquired during their education, said
study researcher Piet Bracke, a professor of sociology at Ghent University
in Belgium.
They also have jobs with less status and prestige, and tend to have
unbalanced support networks — they rely on others for support more often
than those people are able to provide it — which may contribute to their
depression risk, Bracke told LiveScience.
Previous research in Europe has found that people with lower education
levels have about double the risk of having severe and frequent symptoms of
depression, compared to people with more education, but the risk varies
depending on country.
The new study also found that having many highly educated people in a given
country can have detrimental effects on the mental health of all people with
college degrees. In countries where more education did not provide
significantly more job security or salary, even those with degrees who had
jobs that matched their skill level saw declines in their mental health on
average, Bracke said.
"If the economic returns of education decrease, it affects the mental health
of all the well-educated," Bracke said.
Still, Bracke said that he did not consider the expansion of higher
education a bad thing.
But in many western countries, labor markets are slow to catch up with the
increasing numbers of overeducated people, leading to a lack of challenging
jobs for these people, Bracke said.
"At the country level, if the number of people with university education
continues to rise, [and] if there isn't an equivalent upgrading of the labor
market, it will deteriorate the mental health of the population," Bracke
said.
While people may start out with a job that they are overqualified for in the
beginning of their career, they need opportunities to move upward in their
field within a few years, or they could experience declines in mental health
, Bracke said. |
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