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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.

Sec. Mental Health and Wellbeing in Education

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1646178

Educational Attainment as a Marker of Vulnerability: Rethinking the Assumption of Uniform Protection

Provisionally accepted
  • 1Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, United States
  • 2Charles R Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Background: Education is widely viewed as a protective social determinant of health, in part due to its potential to reduce exposure to stressors such as discrimination. While prior research has examined how education affects the likelihood of encountering discrimination, less is known about whether education moderates the impact of discrimination on individual well-beingparticularly across diverse global contexts. Objectives: Built on the intersectionality, this study investigates whether educational attainment moderates the association between perceived discrimination and multiple well-being outcomes-specifically happiness, life satisfaction, and self-rated mental and physical health-using a large, cross-national sample. Methods: We analyzed data from Wave 1 of the Global Flourishing Study (GFS), which includes over 200,000 adults from 23 countries spanning diverse geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts.Interaction terms between perceived discrimination and educational attainment were tested for each well-being outcome, controlling for age, sex, and country (with sensitivity analyses). Results: Overall, 207,919 participants entered our analysis. Perceived discrimination was consistently associated with lower well-being across all outcomes. These negative associations were significantly stronger among individuals with higher educational attainment. In contrast, among those with lower education levels, the associations were weaker. This suggests that higher education may increase individuals' psychological sensitivity to discrimination-possibly due to heightened expectations, differing coping styles, or greater recognition and reporting of unfair treatment. Attenuated effects among those with less education may reflect habituation or limited perceived agency. Conclusion: Higher education does not uniformly buffer individuals from the harms of discrimination. In this study, it appeared to amplify the negative impact of perceived discrimination across multiple dimensions of well-being. These findings challenge the assumption that education is inherently and universally protective, and instead underscore the importance of examining how education may interact with psychosocial stressors in nuanced and context-dependent ways-particularly among marginalized populations.

Keywords: Discrimination, Education, Well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, self-rated health, Cross-National, social determinants

Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Assari and Pallera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Shervin Assari, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, Los Angeles, United States

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