New Study: Life expectancy falling for adults without a bachelor’s degree

Posted by Princeton University on October 17, 2023

Life expectancy in the United States dropped in 2020 due to COVID-19, but for American adults without a college degree, an increase in mortality occurred years earlier, according to a new study authored by Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton of Princeton University.

Since 2010, people without a college degree have experienced an absolute rise in mortality, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Meanwhile, people with a college degree have experienced a decrease.

Case and Deaton studied overall mortality in the United States by calculating, annually from 1990 to 2018, the number of years a 25-year-old could expect to live before their 75th birthday. This assumed mortality rates at each age remained constant at that individual year’s level.

The 25-to-75 age range coincides with the increasing incidence of “deaths of despair” in the United States from drugs, suicide and alcoholic liver disease, as well as a slowing in the decline of mortality from cardiovascular disease. From 1990 to 2010, Americans with and without a bachelor’s degree showed a pattern of almost continuous progress in this measure of adult life expectancy, but with a widening gap, Case and Deaton found. Then, after 2010, there was a drop for those without a degree.

Yet, while the gap in the United States widened based on whether people had a four-year college degree, it narrowed based on race. By 2018, Black Americans with a bachelor’s degree were much closer to whites with a degree in terms of life expectancy than to Black Americans without a degree, a sharp contrast to the early 1990s.

The results illustrate the increasing influence of educational attainment on a person’s health and economic security in the United States, said Case, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, Emeritus, at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs.

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