High schools have long been recognized for shaping students’ futures. According to a new study by researchers from Penn State, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota, high schools may even contribute to how much a person weighs later in life.
The study, published in Social Science and Medicine, highlighted associations between many aspects of students’ lives during high school and their weight decades later at midlife. Attending private high schools, schools with more socioeconomic resources and in-school experiences — like taking more advanced classes and increased popularity — were all correlated with a healthier midlife weight. This held true even net of earning a college degree and attending selective colleges, which other studies previously found to be predictive of adult weight, according to lead author Michelle Frisco, professor of sociology and demography and Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) co-funded faculty member. The team also found these associations were especially strong among women.
“There are decades of research that link the degrees people earn to long-term health and well-being, but there is an entire educational process that goes into earning those degrees that is facilitated by high schools and fostered by parents,” Frisco said. “To really understand why education matters for weight and other health outcomes, my colleagues and I realized that we need to take a step back and better understand how the educational process shapes health.”
Using data collected in the 1980s as part of the National Center for Education Statistics’ High School & Beyond Study and a midlife follow-up of the participants when they were in their early 50s, the researchers investigated how academic, personal and social dimensions of students’ high school lives were related to midlife weight individually and in multivariate models, which consider multiple variable together to identify potential connections and patterns.
Researchers found that family and school socioeconomic status (SES), school type and curricular tracks were all related to midlife weight, with stronger associations for women. Among women, popularity was also associated with midlife weight. Even in multivariate models, the researchers said, family and school and popularity were strong predictors of women’s midlife body mass index (BMI) along with academic attainment, which was also significantly associated with weight.
Women and girls face more weight scrutiny, judgment and expectations to be thin than male peers, Frisco said, which led the team to expect that family SES, social groupings and curricular tracks could matter more for women’s weight than men’s weight. The team said their findings suggest that individuals whose families and schools had a higher SES had a “leg up” on avoiding obesity as adults. They hypothesized that this is due to the way that families, schools and other students foster “health lifestyles” or normative expectations about what people eat, the activities they participate in, and ideals about the importance of being slender and athletic.
“Social groups influence health behaviors and lifestyles, and this process begins very early in life. It begins with families and continues in school,” Frisco said.
The study sample attended high school when only 5% of students were obese, a percentage that quadrupled over four decades. Frisco explained that for this cohort of Americans who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, some high school educational experiences seem to have “inoculated” some people against obesity as it skyrocketed in the U.S. — more than doubling from the late 1970s to the late 1990s — in their later lives.
“Studies like ours are important for thinking about how school programs and policies can help improve long-term health and well-being,” Frisco said.
In the future, the team plans to examine other high school student cohorts to determine if the results from this study are also applicable to younger Americans. They will also continue to explore how the educational process relates to other adult health outcomes.
Emily Lybbert and Chandra Muller from the University of Texas, Eric Grodsky from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and J. Robert Warren from the University of Minnesota contributed to this study.