What’s New
Americans without a bachelor’s degree are likely to die roughly eight years younger than their college-graduate counterparts, according to new research. Here are some highlights:
- Adult life expectancy — the number of years left after age 25 — for people who have earned a four-year degree rose by about five years, to 59 years (age 84) just before the pandemic from 54 years (age 79) in 1992. There was a one-year drop in 2021 during Covid.
- For those without a four-year degree, adult life expectancy peaked at nearly 54 years in 2010. It’s been declining ever since, with a remarkably steep decline of about three years during the pandemic.
- Researchers cited education as a major dividing line between people who are living longer and people who are not, arguing that those with a four-year degree are more “immune” to some of the fastest-growing causes of death.
The Details
For the past decade, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, emeritus professors of economics at Princeton University, have been researching the fastest-growing causes of death in America — suicide, drugs, and alcohol, which the duo termed “deaths of despair.” Their work has uncovered a relationship between education and mortality.
“People with a B.A. or more are more or less immune from the rising death rates that people without a B.A. are struggling with,” Case said in an interview.
The absence of a four-year degree means exclusion from “good jobs, political power and social esteem,” the researchers wrote in an op-ed Tuesday for The New York Times. “As their lives and livelihoods are threatened, their longevity declines.” It’s unclear what exactly about a college degree influences a person’s longevity. It could be related to income, social status, or other factors connected to their daily habits and lifestyle.
“It could be that education actually helps you with your health — educated people don’t smoke as much, they’re less obese — but no one knows whether that’s because of the sort of people who get educated or whether it’s education that actually does it,” Deaton said.
One theory Case cited has to do with status. She said people with a bachelor’s degree or more are “held in much higher regard” than those without.
Case described an example of a woman she met whose health symptoms weren’t taken seriously by her doctor. The woman researched tests online, then went back and asked the doctor for those specific tests. Sure enough, she was diagnosed, Case said. She had the financial ability to pay for any tests not covered by insurance, as well as a certain level of status; she could access research online and challenge the doctor.
“The B.A., in America, is sort of fetishized so that people just think of themselves as having more status if they have a bachelor’s degree, and others treat them that way as well,” Case said.
The Backdrop
Life expectancy in the United States has lagged behind those of comparable countries for several decades. Mortality rates for white, middle-aged Americans without a college degree have shot up recently, overturning a century of progress. And even before Case and Deaton’s new research, a lack of higher education has been linked to increased sickness and death.
For those who’ve been to college but didn’t obtain a bachelor’s degree or more — whether they dropped out, got their associate degree, a certificate, or otherwise — the mortality gap slims, but not by much.
It correlates with the wage premium, the additional income earned by people with college degrees exceeding those with only high-school degrees. The wage premium for people with a bachelor’s degree is 80 percent, Case said, compared to 12 percent for those with some college but no bachelor’s.
The Stakes
About two-thirds of Americans don’t obtain bachelor’s degrees. Many people don’t attend college, and about 33 percent of those who do end up dropping out, largely due to financial reasons and mental-health concerns.
“We would not want to endorse the position that everybody should get a B.A.,” Deaton said. “That’s not the solution to this problem.”
Rather, Case and Deaton said closing the mortality gap requires rethinking who can go to college and how employers weigh credentials. On one hand, they said, higher education must be made more accessible by eliminating barriers such as a lack of information or money.
On the other hand, they said employers need to drop the bachelor’s requirement for certain job screenings. The United States should follow the lead of European countries, Case said, by certifying skills and accepting other degrees in place of a four-year degree. “We have to start appreciating people for the skills that they have, not the degrees that they have,” she said.
Some states have already done this. Policies to broaden acceptable education levels in job applications exist in Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia, Case and Deaton wrote in their op-ed for The Times.
But unless more drastic change comes about, the researchers don’t see much hope in store. Case said her one “little bit of light” is that working-class wages are on the rise, a change she said could lead the deaths-of-despair rate to drop.
Otherwise, the mortality gap will only continue to stretch further.
“As we begin to put Covid in the rearview mirror, God willing, we should see that part of the gap hopefully close,” Case said, but “we have no reason to believe that, unless we do something, we should expect to see these gaps close.”
