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NIJMEGAN, Netherlands — More education is obviously better for your brain health, right? Not so fast. A surprising new study finds that spending an extra year in school won’t do much to slow the aging of your brain.
It is well-known that education has many positive effects. People who spend more time in school are generally healthier, smarter, and have better jobs and higher incomes than those with less education. However, whether prolonged education actually causes changes in brain structure over the long term and protects against brain aging, was still unknown.
Thanks to a “natural experiment” involving 30,000 people published in eLife, researchers at Radboud University Medical Center were able to determine very precisely what an extra year of education does to the brain in the long term. Contrary to what they were expecting, however, researchers found no effect on brain structure and no protective benefit of additional education against brain aging.
In 1972, a change in the law in the United Kingdom raised the number of mandatory school years from 15 to 16, while all other circumstances remained constant. This created an interesting “natural experiment,” an event not under the control of researchers that divides people into an exposed and unexposed group. Data from approximately 30,000 people who attended school around that time, including MRI scans taken much later (46 years after), is available.
The researchers examined the MRI scans for the structure of various brain regions, but they found no differences between those who attended school longer and those who did not.
“This surprised us,” says Nicholas Judd from Radboudumc and the Donders Institute in a media release. “We know that education is beneficial, and we had expected education to provide protection against brain aging. Aging shows up in all of our MRI measures, for instance we see a decline in total volume, surface area, cortical thickness, and worse water diffusion in the brain. However, the extra year of education appears to have no effect here.”
“Our study shows that one should be cautious about assigning causation when only a correlation is observed. Although we also see correlations between education and the brain, we see no evidence of this in brain structure,” adds Rogier Kievit from the Lifespan Cognitive Dynamics lab.
Paper Summary
Methodology
In this study, researchers used a natural experiment based on a policy change in the UK in 1972 that raised the mandatory school-leaving age from 15 to 16 years. This change created a unique situation where individuals born just before the cutoff date (September 1, 1957) could leave school at 15, while those born just after had to stay an additional year. This setup allowed researchers to compare brain structure in adulthood between groups with only a one-year difference in education.
The team analyzed data from over 30,000 participants from the UK Biobank, examining six brain measures, such as total brain volume and cortical thickness, using advanced statistical techniques like regression discontinuity to check for any structural brain changes resulting from the additional year of schooling.
Key Results
The study found no significant differences in brain structure between individuals who stayed in school until 16 versus those who left at 15. This result held across all the brain measurements, such as the size of certain brain areas, the thickness of the cortex, and the volume of brain fluids. In other words, the extra year of schooling didn’t seem to have any lasting effect on the physical structure of the brain. These findings challenge the idea that education directly causes long-term changes in the brain that protect against aging or neurodegenerative diseases.
Study Limitations
First, the study looked at adults who received additional education nearly 50 years ago, so any immediate changes in brain structure might have faded over time. Additionally, MRI scans used to measure brain structure may not capture very subtle brain changes that could have occurred on a microscopic level. Finally, the study only examined individuals in the UK, which may limit the ability to generalize these findings to other populations or educational systems.
Discussion & Takeaways
This research challenges the widely held belief that more education builds up a “brain reserve” that protects against age-related cognitive decline. The findings suggest that while education may boost cognitive skills, it might not lead to physical changes in the brain detectable by standard MRI techniques. The study highlights the complexity of understanding how experiences like education shape the brain over time and suggests that the effects of schooling may not translate directly to changes in brain structure. Future research might need to explore other tools, such as high-resolution imaging, to detect smaller-scale effects or study education’s impact on brain function rather than structure.
Funding & Disclosures
This study was funded by a Hypatia Fellowship granted to Dr. Rogier Kievit from the Radboud University Medical Center. The researchers conducted this work using data from the UK Biobank (application number 23668). The UK Biobank has received ethical approval from the North West Multi-centre Research Ethics Committee, and participants provided informed consent. The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Well, we believed education had a protective effect. So they measured the effect of an additional year of mandatory SCHOOLING.
Perhaps the effect on education (and the brain) of mandatory schooling is well expressed by the saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”
I could see correlation between this group vs those with four or more years of education; that type of research would probably produce results that are too insignificant to discern with from just this group.