The Impact of Education on the Life Course and Life Transitions. A Reserve Perspective

This paper develops a perspective on education as reserves unfolding in individual life courses. The reserve perspective highlights the protective and time-oriented dimensions of resources to deal with vulnerability over the life course, particularly by stressing their dynamics of constitution, activation, and reconstitution, to avoid, cope with, or recover from critical life events. Using the reserve perspective to review education’s effect on individual resilience in relation to historical contexts, we aim to contribute to the study of the role of education in the long-term dynamics of vulnerability across the life course. In particular, our narrative delineates some of the ways education as a social setting became a crucial determinant of secure, although gendered, individual life course during the historical phase of life course standardization and how its function has evolved in recent decades to favor more agency and less institutionalized security through individualized paths of (re)constitution and activation.