New research suggests that getting a good education may not improve people's life chances of happiness.

Researchers at the University of Warwick found that all levels of educational attainment -- low educational attainment and higher educational attainment -- had similar odds of high mental well-being.  Low educational attainment is strongly associated with mental illness but the research team wanted to find out if higher educational attainment is linked with mental wellbeing.

"These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing," professor Sarah Stewart-Brown, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental well-being. But that is not the case."

For the study, high mental wellbeing was defined as "feeling good and functioning well." People with high levels of mental wellbeing manage to feel happy and contented with their lives more often than those who don't because of the way they manage problems and challenges especially in relationships with others.

The team used existing data from the Health Survey for England (HSE) for 2010 and 2011 in which the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) was administered to more than 17,000 survey participants across both years.

Stewart-Brown added that the correlates of high mental well-being are different from those of low mental well-being, but the latter closely mirror the correlates of mental illness.

"Assumptions about socioeconomic determinants made in planning public mental health programs focusing on the prevention of mental illness may therefore not be applicable to programs aiming to increase mental well-being," Stewart-Brown said.

The findings are detailed in the British Journal of Psychiatry.