Education and Welfare: Some Findings from the Scandinavian Survey

Abstract

The relationship and impact of a person's educational level on his level of welfare are examined conceptually and empirically. The empirical data were collected in 1972 and allow comparisons between the Nordic countries.

The paper starts with a short description of the approaches utilized in studying welfare in the Nordic countries during the past ten years. The good of man is in two parts: welfare which can be approached objectively, and well-being, which is a subjective concept. The research done in the Nordic countries has focused mainly on welfare and less on well-being, at least when compared with research done on the continent of Europe and in America.

Education is seen to have two roles in welfare. On the one hand it is a resource which people can use in improving their living conditions; on the other, it is a value in itself. Empirical data show that in the socioeconomic achievement process, education has a crucial role. In addition, well-educated people have slightly better living conditions than poorly educated people. Their housing level is better, their physical and mental health is better, etc. These slight advantages of the well-educated people should not be exaggerated, but it does seem likely that education actually functions as a resource which can be used in advancing one's level of welfare.

The relationship between educational level and (subjectively measured) well-being is shown to be very slight and in some cases virtually nonexistent. This result is not characteristic of education alone: it has been found that objective indicators in general are slightly correlated with subjective indicators of well-being.

On the basis of the empirical data used here it seems that education is similarly related to welfare and well-being in all the Nordic countries. Of course slight differences might be observed but the similarity is the major pattern.