ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Life expectancy in adulthood is falling for those without a BA degree, but as educational gaps have widened, racial gaps have narrowed.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- The dose-response relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and alcohol-attributable mortality risk-a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Why the mortality penalty of smoking is rising over time.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- The Newest Federalism and Population Health.The Milbank quarterly · 2026Article
- Public Policies in Historical Context and the Association Between Education and US Older Adults' Health.The Milbank quarterly · 2026Article
- Racial, Ethnic, and Socioeconomic Disparities in Self-reported Health Among U.S. Adults, 2023-2024.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 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
- Comparing undergraduates' stigma toward peers with criminal records and mental health disorders.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Heterogeneity in Asian Americans' mortality trends, 2000-2022.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2026Article
- Trajectories of spiritual well-being across the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.The American journal of orthopsychiatry · 2026Article
- Can alcohol use explain the increase in educational inequalities in all-cause mortality after 2010 in the USA? A three-way interaction analysis.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2026Article
- Mediating role of psychological distress and alcohol use in socioeconomic disparities in deaths of despair: a causal mediation analysis using record linkage data.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2025Article
- Social determinants of health and life expectancy in US adults.Journal of translational medicine · 2025Article
- Causal effect of education on low back pain, intervertebral disc degeneration and sciatica: Mendelian randomization study.Future science OA · 2025Article
- The Impact of Social Determinants of Health on Ocular Diseases in Western New York: A Comparative Ecological Study of Two U.S. Counties.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Interrogating Theories and Mechanisms Underlying Educational Inequities in Diet Quality.The Journal of nutrition · 2025Review
- Patterns of spatial inequality in China's longevity population and its socio-economic influences.BMC public health · 2025Article
- The Gender Gap in Life Expectancy in the United States and Deaths of Despair: Trends from 1979 to 2022.Population and development review · 2025Article
- Cohort mortality forecasts indicate signs of deceleration in life expectancy gains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 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
- Life Expectancy and Health Expectancy in the Twenty-first Century: The Unthinkable, the Inconceivable, and the Unknowable.Demography · 2025Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
A 4-y college degree is increasingly the key to good jobs and, ultimately, to good lives in an ever-more meritocratic and unequal society. The bachelor's degree (BA) is increasingly dividing Americans; the one-third with a BA or more live longer and more prosperous lives, while the two-thirds without face rising mortality and declining prospects. We construct a time series, from 1990 to 2018, of a summary of each year's mortality rates and expected years lived from 25 to 75 at the fixed mortality rates of that year. Our measure excludes those over 75 who have done relatively well over the last three decades and focuses on the years when deaths rose rapidly through drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholic liver disease and when the decline in mortality from cardiovascular disease slowed and reversed. The BA/no-BA gap in our measure widened steadily from 1990 to 2018. Beyond 2010, as those with a BA continued to see increases in our period measure of expected life, those without saw declines. This is true for the population as a whole, for men and for women, and for Black and White people. In contrast to growing education gaps, gaps between Black and White people diminished but did not vanish. By 2018, intraracial college divides were larger than interracial divides conditional on college; by our measure, those with a college diploma are more alike one another irrespective of race than they are like those of the same race who do not have a BA.
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