Americans without a college degree have a substantially shorter life span on average compared to those with a BA, and the gap is widening, growing significantly during the pandemic.
That’s the startling finding of a new study, “Accounting for the Widening Mortality Gap between American Adults with and without a BA,” from Princeton economists Ann Case and Angus Deaton, whose previous work on this topic are contained in their highly acclaimed book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism.
Now, they’ve updated their research and found that a college degree has become an even more important divider of Americans’ life trajectories. Using death records that include educational qualifications, they calculated life expectancy by college degree, starting at age 25, when most people have completed their education. The time period of the study is 1992-2021.
Future life expectancy at age 25 for those with four-year college degrees rose to 59 years on the eve of the pandemic. In other words, the average college-educated individual would live to 84, representing an increase over the average of 79 years of age in 1992. During the pandemic, however, life expectancy for this group slipped back a year.
But for those without college degrees, the expected life span peaked around 2010 and has been falling since. Future life expectancy for these individuals was two and a half years less than those with a degree – 51.6 years, in 1992, meaning, on average, people without a degree would live to be nearly 77 years old. But by 2021, it had declined to 49.8 years (or about 75 years old), roughly eight and a half years less than people with college degrees. Adult life expectancy for this group lost 3.3 years during the pandemic.
In other words, the gap of 2.5 years of longevity between those with and without a college degree in 1992 had more than tripled by 2021!
According to a new essay by Case in the New York Times, American life expectancy grew by about four months each year in the 1970s so that by the 1980s, it was similar to average life expectancy in other rich countries. Since then, however, while other countries have continued to progress, with life spans increasing by more than two and a half months a year, the United States gradually “and then precipitously (has) fallen behind.”
Case described the educational divide as “both shocking and rare,” adding that she and Deaton have found only one other similar example in modern history – in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Like those countries, the United States is failing its less educated people, an awful condemnation of where the country is today,” she writes.
“GDP may be doing great, but people are dying in increasing numbers, especially less-educated people,” said Case, in an interview with The Brookings Institution. “A lot of the increasing prosperity is going to the well-educated elites. It is not going to typical working people.”
Several factors probably account for the education-moderated gap in life expectancy. Increasingly, the U.S. is a country that rewards the well-educated but overlooks or punishes those without college credentials. Differential access to health care, a greater likelihood of unhealthy behaviors among people without college degrees, a difference in the safety of living environments, and more “deaths of despair” – involving suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism – are all likely culprits.
Case and Deacon also blame the gap on what they call indirect forces such as the “broader social and economic forces in the communities where people work and live.” Among them are poorer job prospects for less-educated workers and “the negative effects on health of corporate-sponsored laws passed in Republican-controlled state legislatures” involving minimum wages, right to work laws, pollution, guns, and tobacco taxes and controls, all of which hurt working-class Americans more than those enjoying the privilege associated with a college degree.
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