No snake oil. Education really does make you happier, healthier and more active in political and civic affairs. The OECD took the first steps to map the social outcomes of learning in 2007 with the publication of the report 'Understanding the Social Outcomes of Learning'. This summer, the OECD will expand on this with a more detailed study of the initial findings.

The beneficial effects of education for health and civic engagement are mapped by the OECD as part of the Social Outcomes of Learning (SOL) project. The latest and not yet published results are, at a glance:

> You will be more satisfied in life, especially if your roots are in the lower social classes or you are poor.
> You will have lower risk of suffering from depression, particularly if you are a woman and you trade-up from no education to a basic level of schooling.
> You will be more engaged in civic affairs if you have more education and live in communities with other well educated people.
> You will be more tolerant towards immigration and express more trust towards immigrants if you are better educated.

It would be tempting to explain the two latter results in particular as a result of increased income from more education, but this does not seem to be the case according to the, as yet unpublished, results. Education makes the difference. These results are based on rigorous analysis of large data sets covering large populations in the OECD countries. In the absence of randomized controlled trials - which are hard to perform as you can't determine whole life trajectories based on a random allocation in test and control groups - this is the best available statistical evidence there is.

This indicates a causal relationship between education and civic engagement and health, according to Tom Schuller. He is the former Head of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) at the OECD, and until recently he was responsible for the SOLproject. Today, he works as a consultant for the project. He explains the importance of the results this way:

"It is important for us to understand the contribution education makes. Education has to compete with health and other worthy causes for public funding. It must demonstrate its effectiveness in as many ways as possible. The pioneering role for this work has been to explore these complex interrelationships for the first time, both in the OECD and internationally."

What are the chances that SOL will have the desired impact in the current economic climate? Desjardins is very sober in his analysis.

"We are faced with the greatest crisis in the last 100 years. For the next decade, interest will shift almost exclusively to the employability effects of education. It is difficult to deny that people need jobs. They need to be employed before we talk about the other stuff. Following Maslow's hierarchy of needs, security, jobs, food and shelter are at the base."

Nor is Schuller very optimistic in his personal analysis of where the political focus will be in the time to come.

"One could say that we have got to focus on skills and labor market returns from education measured by employment and income. This is where the standard focus of educational economists has been."

But however understandable, it could turn out to be a mistake, as the recession is not only a challenge when it comes to job creation and material values, but also accentuates the need to look at issues of values, health and social stability, argues Tom Schuller.

"Given the huge unpredictability of the current economic situation, we need a broad approach to understand how education helps to keep societies together, how it enables individuals to retain resilience and employability. It means paying more attention to these issues."

Richard Desjardins agrees:
"Education is at the center of all of this, but this is poorly recognized, at least explicitly. Parents are losing the battle in teaching their children values, the schools are taking a neutral position and the media are taking over. A narrow approach to education has huge negative implications for the future of our societies. I would make the case that we need to keep it on the agenda, but it's an uphill battle."

The conclusion is that the true value of education for a society is larger than the value the individual gets from education. In economic terms this is called a positive externality. This explains why education should not be left to individual market decisions, but should instead be financed in whole or in part by society.

"In a neo-classical framework, people themselves should invest in education. In that case there would be under-investment, because the benefits don't accrue only to the individual who invests, but also to the people around him or her. The evidence for cumulative effects exists, but in different shapes and formats depending on the scientific disciplines: Economics, sociology, political science. Not all meet the criteria of scientific evidence that are dominant in current discourse. In the economics area, the literature identifies cumulative effects, but they are quite limited and narrow and they are not picking up the potentialities nor linking them across the disciplines," says Desjardins.

As a result, it is difficult to compare cumulative benefits of things like socialization and voting vis-à-vis cumulative effects of production of competencies for industry and commerce.

"The task is to map out all the potential effects of education and understand how they might relate to each other," says Desjardins. However, this still leaves us with the question of whether politicians are prepared to navigate with the new map in a time of crisis.

By Torben Clausen quarterly@dpu.dk

The Social Outcomes of Learning-project employs three models to describe the benefits from education. These models were developed by David Campbell, Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, as part of an extensive review of the research literature in the field of political science.

• The absolute model An individual's own level of education is the driving mechanism in explaining a specific social outcome. An overall expansion of education is expected to lead to an overall increase in these social outcomes. The net effect of an expansion would be positive-sum, so that at least some groups stand to gain while no others are made worse off.
• The relative model An individual's level of education relative to others around him or her explains a specific social outcome. It implies that education has an effect, not by directly changing or developing the self, but rather by changing the position of the individual in the hierarchy of social relations. An overall expansion of education would not necessarily lead to overall increase in particular social outcomes, if some groups benefit from the expansion while others lose. The net effect of an expansion would be zero-sum.
• The cumulative model The individual's peer group matters. The individual's own education can effect a change in the self, but the outcome is also conditional on the average level of education of the individuals' peers and/or surrounding groups. This means that certain outcomes associated with education are only likely to materialize among groups with similar levels of educational attainment, but especially that the prevalence of the outcomes will increase with the average level. This model is the most difficult to apply in analysis, but it can be extremely significant as an argument for sustaining education as a public good.

Source: 'Understanding the Social Outcomes of Learning', OECD, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation 2007. Read more at www.oecd.org/edu/socialoutcomes.

Recent research by the OECD has shown that education has beneficial effects on health and civic engagement, but researchers warn politicians against jumping to the conclusion that more schooling is necessarily better. But why should politicians even care about these social outcomes of learning when the economy is bust and unemployment is skyrocketing?