Adult life expectancy falling for those without a college degree

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uosc-ale030721.php

 

News Release 8-Mar-2021
Before COVID-19, adult life expectancy declined for less-educated Americans
University of Southern California

 

American adults without a college degree have experienced greater reductions in life expectancy when compared to their more-educated counterparts, USC and Princeton researchers have found.

The study reveals that after nearly a century of declining mortality up to the late 1990s, the progress continued into the 21st century for more-educated Americans but stalled for the population as a whole and reversed for the two-thirds of Americans who do not have a college degree.

The study appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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"The United States has this increasingly sharp societal division between people who have a college degree and those who don't," said Deaton, Presidential Professor of Economics at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Distinguished Fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of International Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton. "If you don't have a four-year degree, not only have your wages been falling for 50 years but our study shows your adult life expectancy is also decreasing."

"America is the richest large country in the world, with frontier medical technology, yet we still see large declines for Americans without a four-year degree, even prior to the arrival of COVID-19," said study author Anne Case, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at Princeton University. "Without a four-year college diploma, it is increasingly difficult to build a meaningful and successful life in the United States."

The researchers found that although the adult life expectancy gap widened between those with and without a college degree, it narrowed based on race. By 2018, the adult life expectancy of Black Americans with a bachelor's degree -- who in the past had a lower adult life expectancy than whites without a degree -- was closer to whites with a college degree than to Black Americans without a degree. This is in stark contrast with the larger racial divides of the 1990s.

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"Good jobs have become increasingly rare for workers without a college diploma, many of whom have lost their jobs to globalization and automation and for whom the cost of employer-provided health care has increasingly priced them out of the high-quality labor market," said Deaton. "There has been a real loss of the pillars of working-class life, and it has contributed to this decline in adult life expectancy."

The study's data predate the devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

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Case and Deaton predict the pandemic will only exacerbate the education divide in life expectancy. They point to the fact that those without a bachelor's degree are more likely to work in sectors where they may face a greater risk of exposure than those with college degrees who are more likely to be able to work at home.

In their book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Case and Deaton documented the deaths of despair -- a devastating epidemic that preceded COVID-19, taking the lives of 158,000 Americans in 2018 and contributing to the first three-year drop in U.S. life expectancy since the Spanish flu. They explored the struggles that have primarily affected those without a college degree, which led them to suicide, alcoholism, drug overdoses and premature death.