This post, the first in a series, focuses on the paper Life expectancy in adulthood is falling for those without a BA degree, but as educational gaps have widened, racial gaps have narrowed, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The authors focused on the relationship between life expectancy and Americans who had or didn’t have a 4-year degree/bachelor’s degree. The authors’ previous research has shown that Americans who don’t have a bachelor’s degree are those for whom “deaths of despair” (death as a result of drugs, liver disease due to alcohol, and suicide) as well as smoking, obesity, and cardiovascular disease are far more likely (1–3). This same group is also more likely to experience “pain of all kinds (4), disability, difficulty socializing” with additional negative effects noted in marriage, money, and jobs, and self-evaluation of their own life and health.
The authors state that,
“The big differences are between those with and without a 4-year degree; people with some college do better than those with only a high school degree, but the biggest step is between some college and a 4-year degree.” (emphasis ours)
The measure the authors use is the number of years someone at age 25 can expect to live before their 75th birthday. 10 years would mean that someone lived 10 years after age 25, or to age 35.
So in the graph below (Figure 1 in the paper), someone without a BA degree in 1990 could expect to live fewer than 45 additional years at age 25 (to the age of 70). Someone with a BA degree in 1990 could expect to live nearly 47 additional years at age 25 (to the age of 72). That’s a difference of about 2 years. But the life expectancy of those two populations (with and without a BA) diverge as time goes by, with the rate of divergence increasing after 2010 to more than 3 years.
Note that the fall in life expectancy since 2010 is confined to those without a BA. The percent of Americans with a BA degree actually rose between 1990 and 2019 (from 20.0% to 32.1%, US Census Bureau), so this isn’t a matter of effects seeming to be magnified as a result of a decreasing sample size; the difference is large and it is increasing.
It is almost impossible to overstate what is happening: Since 2010, people who have finished college with a 4-year degree are living increasingly longer and those who do not have a degree, either from not finishing college or never starting, are living increasingly shorter lives.
The immediate causes of death for those with or without a BA can be determined very accurately (such as by overdose, suicide, car accident, etc.). But the proximate causes—the underlying causes—for “deaths of despair” is not nearly as clear. What causes individuals to smoke, abuse drugs and/or alcohol, and contemplate suicide? The authors’ preferred explanation—the one that seems to best fit the data—is changes to the labor market, “Especially automation and the increased demands for more educated workers to operate the robots as well as the rising costs of employer-provided healthcare, have reduced the supply of good, well-paid jobs for people without a BA.”
Put as plainly as possible, the difference between FINISHING college and not affects, in a variety of ways, how long and how well someone is likely to live.
What can we do? The simplest way to make a positive change would be to increase the population of individuals finishing college. These individuals have already been accepted into college and at least started the work needed to earn a 4-year degree. We just need to find a way to 1) keep individuals in college and 2) help those who did not finish, for whatever reason, get back into college and on track to earn their degree.
As long as students are remain in college, there is hope they (and the school) will do what can be done to make completing a degree a reality.
For students who left school without finishing, it’s a far different story.
This is the population that is poised to make the greatest gains in life expectancy by somehow completing college, according to the authors, as “the biggest step (in life expectancy) is between some college and a 4-year degree.” In order for that to happen, these individuals need two things: 1) a logistical on-ramp back into school and 2) the reason(s) they left must be addressed so that they have hope of finishing their degree.
Our next post will continue this story.
- A. Case, A. Deaton, Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 15078–15083 (2015).
- A. Case, A. Deaton, Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century. Brookings Pap. Econ. Act. 2017, 397–476 (2017).
- A. Case, A. Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2020).
- A. Case, A. Deaton, A. A. Stone, Decoding the mystery of American pain reveals a warning for the future. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 24785–24789 (2020).
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