A study published in The Lancet Public Health Journal found that attending a university or school for a year may increase life expectancy, but not attending an educational institution may be just as harmful as smoking or binge drinking.
The study contained approximately 10,000 data points gathered from more than 600 published articles, with data identified from 59 different nations, PTI reports.
Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) were part of the team that discovered that education saves lives irrespective of social and demographic backgrounds, age, sex, or location.
They discovered that for every additional year of schooling, the chance of dying decreases by 2%. This indicates that there was an average 13% reduction in death risk for individuals who finished six years of elementary school.
As per the study, the chance of dying decreased by approximately 25% after completing secondary school and by 34% after 18 years of schooling.
Researchers also found similar health results when they compared the effects of education to other risk factors, such as maintaining a healthy diet, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption.
For example, the benefit of 18 years of education can be compared to that of eating the ideal amount of vegetables, as opposed to not eating vegetables at all, they said.
According to the experts, skipping school entirely is equivalent to consuming five or more alcoholic beverages or ten cigarettes a day for a decade.
Plethora of benefits
"Education is important in its own right, not just for its benefits on health, but now being able to quantify the magnitude of this benefit is a significant development," said study co-author Terje Andreas Eikemo from NTNU.
The researchers noted that whereas youth benefit most from education, adults over 50 and even 70 years old also gain from education's protective effects. They discovered no discernible variation in the effects of schooling across nations with varying degrees of development.
This indicates that the benefits of longer schooling are similar in wealthy and developing nations.
"We need to increase social investments to enable access to better and more education around the globe to stop the persistent inequalities that are costing lives," said Mirza Balaj, co-lead author and postdoctoral fellow at NTNU.
"More education leads to better employment and higher income, better access to health care, and helps us take care of our health. Highly educated people also tend to develop a larger set of social and psychological resources that contribute to their health and the length of their lives," Balaj added.
Given that the majority of the research evaluated for this study came from high-income environments, additional work is needed in low- and middle-income nations, especially in sub-Saharan and North Africa where data are rare.
"Closing the education gap means closing the mortality gap, and we need to interrupt the cycle of poverty and preventable deaths with the help of international commitment," said Claire Henson, co-lead author and researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington's School of Medicine, US.
"In order to reduce inequalities in mortality, it's important to invest in areas that promote people's opportunities to get an education. This can have a positive effect on population health in all countries," Henson added.