ArticleDemography2016
Trends in Life Expectancy and Lifespan Variation by Educational Attainment: United States, 1990-2010.
Article in Demography, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 118 papers.
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Who cites it
118 citing papers in PubMed.
- Health Inequalities, Intersectionality, and Justice.The Milbank quarterly · 2026Article
- Parental education and children's old-age mortality: Evidence using college expansions.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2026Article
- Human-capital formation: The importance of endogenous longevity.European economic review · 2026Article
- Public Policies in Historical Context and the Association Between Education and US Older Adults' Health.The Milbank quarterly · 2026Article
- Structured Inequality, Uncertain Lifespans: Demographic Perspectives on Predicting Individual-Level Longevity.Population and development review · 2026Article
- Changing educational attainment as a driver of cohort changes in healthy longevity: a decomposition analysis of US birth cohorts.American journal of epidemiology · 2026Article
- A Double Decomposition of Standard Deviation Below the Modal Age at Death and the Role of Causes of Death.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2026Article
- Slowdown in mortality improvements and trends in lifespan inequality across high-income countries: the role of changing causes of death, 2010-2021.European journal of public health · 2026Article
- The Interaction of Racial-Ethnic and Economic Concentration and its Association with Premature Mortality in U.S. Neighborhoods.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Changes in the Education-Health Gradient Within U.S. States, 1993-2019.Population research and policy review · 2026Article
- Longer healthy life, but for how many? A stochastic analysis of healthy lifespan inequality.Annals of operations research · 2026Article
- Ageing populations: new challenges in longevity.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Health inequalities in the Nordic countries: A comparative overview and update.Journal of internal medicine · 2025Review
- Spatiotemporal trajectory of life expectancy and its disparity in China 2000-2030: modelling and prediction.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Spatial Trends in Mortality Convergence: The Cases of France, Italy, and Spain, 1975-2019.European journal of population = Revue europeenne de demographie · 2025Article
- Education, health-based selection, and the widening mortality gap between Americans with and without a 4-year college degree.American journal of epidemiology · 2025Article
- Spatially Continuous Maps of Disease Risk: An Analysis of Mortality Disparities in the United States.AJPM focus · 2025Article
- Life Expectancy and Health Expectancy in the Twenty-first Century: The Unthinkable, the Inconceivable, and the Unknowable.Demography · 2025Article
- An inclusive economy dataset for wards in Great Britain using administrative and synthetic data sources.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Association of Immune Cell Subsets With Longevity: The Cardiovascular Health Study.The journals of gerontology. Series A, Biological sciences and medical sciences · 2025Article
58 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Abstract
The educational gradient in life expectancy is well documented in the United States and in other low-mortality countries. Highly educated Americans, on average, live longer than their low-educated counterparts, who have recently seen declines in adult life expectancy. However, limiting the discussion on lifespan inequality to mean differences alone overlooks other dimensions of inequality and particularly disparities in lifespan variation. The latter represents a unique form of inequality, with higher variation translating into greater uncertainty in the time of death from an individual standpoint, and higher group heterogeneity from a population perspective. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990 to 2010, this is the first study to document trends in both life expectancy and S25--the standard deviation of age at death above 25--by educational attainment. Among low-educated whites, adult life expectancy declined by 3.1 years for women and by 0.6 years for men. At the same time, S25 increased by about 1.5 years among high school-educated whites of both genders, becoming an increasingly important component of total lifespan inequality. By contrast, college-educated whites benefited from rising life expectancy and record low variation in age at death, consistent with the shifting mortality scenario. Among blacks, adult life expectancy increased, and S25 plateaued or declined in nearly all educational attainment groups, although blacks generally lagged behind whites of the same gender on both measures. Documenting trends in lifespan variation can therefore improve our understanding of lifespan inequality and point to diverging trajectories in adult mortality across socioeconomic strata.
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