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The schooled are healthier, but school doesn’t make folks healthy:
There is a strong, positive and well-documented correlation between education and health outcomes. … [We study] two changes to British compulsory schooling laws that generated sharp differences in educational attainment among individuals born just months apart. … The cohorts just affected by these changes completed significantly more education than slightly older cohorts subject to the old laws. However, we find little evidence that this additional education improved health outcomes or changed health behaviors. (more)
The latest AER has two empirical papers (here, here) purporting to show that school does cause health. They use fancier, but in my opinion less reliable techniques.
School Isn’t Healthy
LGA, they are using a gap in birth-dates of just a few months. Should we really see much of a dumbing down effect over that time span?
No, I think colleges have dumbed down their courses and their entrance requirement so they can get more people in the door and get more of those education dollars that have been thrown around.
Other people mistook the correlation between IQ and health as a correlation between education and health, probably because they have a vested interest in selling that shit so they can get on the gravy train supported by governments expropriating ever more money from taxpayers.
Now that the average IQ of college attendees has gone down, the correlation is starting to go away.