I think the rationale for that study that you referenced that we’re presenting here at this conference was really because there are many factors that would allow certain individuals not necessarily to, take the normal route that we refer to as educational attainment. So go to college, you know, there are other avenues like vocational studies where people are also trained to a reasonable extent and structural barriers could make people decide whether or not to go to college...
I think the rationale for that study that you referenced that we’re presenting here at this conference was really because there are many factors that would allow certain individuals not necessarily to, take the normal route that we refer to as educational attainment. So go to college, you know, there are other avenues like vocational studies where people are also trained to a reasonable extent and structural barriers could make people decide whether or not to go to college. But when we categorize educational level, it’s usually in reference to whether you have a bachelor’s degree or master’s, you know, the four walls of an institution. And because education is a key primary factor with respect to any kind of disorder risk, just like even Alzheimer’s disease or dementia risk, we thought to look at it in a different way. So instead of looking at education just like that, let’s look at what it means to not be a completer. And a completer just means, oh, you don’t have a particular degree. You didn’t complete your GED or your high school certificate, GCSE, like it would be in the UK. Or you didn’t complete bachelor’s degrees. So you had completers, non-completers, and then we also looked at people who were involved in vocational training versus, you know, professional or the more traditional routes of educational attainment. And the summary really is that we do see that generally education, right? People who complete degrees or not, will have a protective effect with respect to cognitive outcomes. So that’s generally known. But what we’re also seeing, is depending on the kind of vocation people engage in, right, setting cognitive domains like in the study memory and visuospatial, were particularly relevant to individuals who did not follow the traditional route of educational attainment. So these are vocational trainings and non-completers, right? We saw associations in the memory domain and the visuospatial domains as well. So, I mean, I just think it allows us to look at education in a different way and not just looking at completion and a degree being awarded, but also look at things like quality of education, especially within the U.S. context, where the quality of education matters. In the U.S., your zip code sometimes, if not maybe many times, determines your health outcome, determines access to resources. So the quality of education, which of the structural barriers that can hinder people from following that traditional route of education and going to vocational training and all of that, how much does that help in terms of cognitive performance or attainment? That’s really what we try to do, but yeah, we do see that the non-completers or non-traditional educational routes, right, do have a relationship or association, rather, because it’s also a cross-sectional study. It has an association with cognitive performance, usually in the memory and visual spatial domain. So domain-specific effects may be relevant when we look at this issue.
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