Poor mental-health during childhood correlated negatively with educational attainment. Given the strong link between educational success and adult life, more resources are needed to support children with mental-health problems.

higher education is positively linked to less psychological distress, and the link can somewhat be understood through the mechanisms of social and labour-market resources.

Higher education reduces the probability of unhealthy behavior. Thus, investments in higher education should be an important public goal.

There is extensive research pointing to the positive effects of education in the form of labour market outcomes. These outcomes are vital when evaluating education; there are however additional outcomes of education that might also be important for quality of life. From this point of view, education could affect non-market areas such as democracy, gender equality and civic engagement. This article investigates the effects of level of education and field of study on two vital non-market capabilities: agency and voice. The study uses an eight-year longitudinal national survey of 1058 Swedish youth, controlling for baseline values of voice and agency. The empirical analysis shows that university education increases young people's capabilities of voice and agency. Field of study was also found to have a relationship with agency, where social science and business education was found to be connected with the highest probability of agency, whereas there were only small effects of field of education on voice.

This article elaborates on previous research showing that educational achievement is negatively related to poor mental health during adolescence and positively related to the family's socioeconomic resources. We examine (i) the potential moderating effects of family resources on the negative relationship between educational achievement and poor mental health and (ii) the impact of resources linked to the mother and father, respectively, on educational achievements. We use register data that cover all children born in Sweden in 1990 who still lived there in 2010 (n = 115,882). We use two dependent variablesupper secondary school graduation and grade point average (GPA)and analyse the performance of girls and boys separately. Our results indicate that the impact of mothers' socioeconomic resources on children's school performance is stronger overall than that of fathers' resources. The compensatory effects of family socioeconomic resources on the risk of failure to graduate are more pronounced amongst girls than boys. With regard to GPA, compensatory effects are largely absent.