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Study: Send Your Kids to College, You’ll Live Longer

Study: Send Your Kids to College, You’ll Live Longer
9/23/2014
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Suada Kolovic

Forget superfoods like acai berries and quinoa: Sending your kids to college might be the surest route to living a longer life!

According to new research by Esther Friedman of the RAND Corporation and Robert Mare of UCLA, parents of college graduates live two years longer than parents whose kids don't graduate high school. But how? College-educated children are able to influence their parents' behavior in positive ways: “Highly-educated offspring may directly improve their parents' health by convincing them to change their health behaviors.” (In other words, the child becomes the parent.) Friedman and Mare examined more than 25,000 individuals tracked in the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative sample of Americans aged 51 and over, from 1992 to 2006. They found that the effect on children's education on parents' life expectancy was not just coincidence – it was robust even after controlling for the parents' own socioeconomic resources. The takeaway from this research is that we may be able to better care for our future senior population by providing educational resources to children now. "Improving the education of younger generations could potentially improve the health of two generations of the family (the younger generation as well as their parents)," Friedman said. "This is something that policy makers could consider when evaluating the potential impact of a program.” (For more of this study, click here.)

What are your thoughts on the study? Do you think it's likely that children with a college education offer more financial means to take care of their parents as they age? Share your thoughts in the comments section. And don't forget to try and fund your college education with as much free money as possible – a great place to start is by creating a free profile on Scholarships.com.

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