High School Composition and Health Outcomes in Adulthood: A Cohort Study

Alison K. Cohen, Emily J. Ozer, David H. Rehkopf and Barbara Abrams
Additional contact information
Alison K. Cohen: Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, School of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, CA 94158, USA
Emily J. Ozer: School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
David H. Rehkopf: Departments of Epidemiology & Population Health and Medicine, School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Barbara Abrams: School of Public Health, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 7, 1-11

Abstract: Background: A multitude of empirical evidence documents links between education and health, but this focuses primarily on educational attainment and not on characteristics of the school setting. Little is known about the extent to which aggregate characteristics of the school setting, such as student body demographics, are associated with adult health outcomes. Methods: We use the U.S. nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort to statistically assess the association between two different measures of high school student composition (socioeconomic composition, racial/ethnic composition) and two different health outcomes at age 40 (self-rated health and obesity). Results: After adjusting for confounders, high school socioeconomic composition, but not racial/ethnic composition, was weakly associated with both obesity and worse self-rated health at age 40. However, after adding adult educational attainment to the model, only the association between high school socioeconomic composition and obesity remained statistically significant. Conclusions: Future research should explore possible mechanisms and also if findings are similar across other populations and in other school contexts. These results suggest that education policies that seek to break the link between socioeconomic composition and negative outcomes remain important but may have few spillover effects onto health.

Keywords: USA; educational status; obesity; self-rated health; social determinants of health; social epidemiology; school composition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/7/3799/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/7/3799/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:18:y:2021:i:7:p:3799-:d:530596

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().