Higher education and the impact on health outcomes and behavior - does the degree choice matter?

Given recent increases in higher education tuition fees in the United Kingdom, understanding the returns to education has gained importance. This paper focuses on the evaluation of the wider returns to education, more specifically the impact of education on health outcomes and behaviour considering different choices of higher degrees. It is well known that both monetary and non-monetary returns to education differ according to years of schooling, but recently there has been a renewed interest to also evaluate the difference in monetary returns between subject choices. However, little has been done to understand differences in the wider returns as well. By using panel data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS), a longitudinal data from the UK that followed individuals from birth in 1958 to the latest available sweep in 2008, this study tries to understand if there are any differences between health outcomes and health behaviours between individuals with the same educational attainment but with different degree choices. There are clear significant health returns to having a degree and the finding is very robust, but unlike studies that have shown differences in monetary returns, the results also show that there are no significant differences in the effects of education on health across different degrees.