Education and life expectancy are strikingly correlated, and the gaps are growing.
Do you ever, in your darker moments, wonder what all that education was for?
Do you sometimes suspect you might have been happier leaving school at the first opportunity and working in hospitality or retail?
If you’re in one of the younger cohorts, do you wonder why you racked up all that university debt and whether you’ll ever pay it off?
Congratulations! You’ll have many more years in which to regret your choices, according to a Lancet Public Health paper that finds a substantial lifespan disparity between the more educated and the less so.
At least in America.
This observational study estimated life expectancy at age 25 across 3110 US counties from 2000 to 2019 in four categories of educational attainment, from early school leavers to university graduates.
Among our Transpacific friends, not only is there a clear gradient in life expectancy but those with more education are increasing their life expectancy faster.
For every year of the study, people with degrees lived longer than college dropouts, who beat school graduates, who beat those who didn’t finish school.
The gap between the highest and lowest groups rose from just over eight years in 2000 to about 11 years in 2019.
Women lived longer than men across all categories, with the greatest disparity, 5.8 years, in high-school grads.
Increase in life expectancy over the two decades was 2.5 years for the degreed and a bare 0.3 years for early school leavers. These increases were greater in the first decade of the study than the second, which saw a slowdown and even some declines.
Here’s a startling way to express the disparity: “[I]f US college graduates were a country, their life expectancy would have ranked fourth (of 199) globally in 2019. In contrast, those with less than a high-school degree would have ranked 137th…”
There were some regional differences that overcame educational differences – central Colorado did better overall while parts of Appalachia did poorly overall. In Boston, NYC, DC and southern and central California, people lived relatively long even without finishing school.
If you’re detecting a political pattern there, the authors note “that local economic and policy environments can mediate the relationship between education and health; for example, education can influence health via employment, and therefore the relationship between education and health could be modified by labour market conditions”.
Countries with stronger welfare policies have smaller gaps between high and low educational attainment, they say.
Areas with high migrant intake, they note, such as SoCal, may have a longevity advantage. While Mexican immigrants are less likely to have finished school they are healthier overall through the selection of being well enough to migrate.
No one who’s ever heard the term “social determinants” will be particularly surprised.
The relationship between health and education is most likely bidirectional and influenced by other linked factors. Education increases income, allowing better health maintenance and care; good health allows better and more education; health and education may both be markers of social class; both may be influenced by personality factors such as determination.
There is also the huge question of systemic racial inequities in both variables.
One acknowledged limitation is the study’s assumption that all education is attained by age 25.
As an arts grad who undertook a surprise master of public health in my late 30s, allowing me to wangle my present job, it’s hard to say whether the adventure has increased my longevity or shaved years off my life.
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