Trends in Education-Specific Life Expectancy, Data Quality, and Shifting Education Distributions: A Note on Recent Research

Abstract

Several recent articles have reported conflicting conclusions about educational differences in life expectancy, and this is partly due to the use of unreliable data subject to a numerator-denominator bias previously reported as ranging from 20 % to 40 %. This article presents estimates of life expectancy and lifespan variation by education in the United States using more reliable data from the National Health Interview Survey. Contrary to prior conclusions in the literature, I find that life expectancy increased or stagnated since 1990 among all education-race-sex groups except for non-Hispanic white women with less than a high school education; there has been a robust increase in life expectancy among white high school graduates and a smaller increase among black female high school graduates; lifespan variation did not increase appreciably among high school graduates; and lifespan variation plays a very limited role in explaining educational gradients in mortality. I also discuss the key role that educational expansion may play in driving future changes in mortality gradients. Because of shifting education distributions, within an education-specific synthetic cohort, older age groups are less negatively select than younger age groups. We could thus expect a greater concentration of mortality at younger ages among people with a high school education or less, which would be reflected in increasing lifespan variability for this group. Future studies of educational gradients in mortality should use more reliable data and should be mindful of the effects of shifting education distributions.

Trends in Non‐Hispanic White Mortality in the United States by Metropolitan‐Nonmetropolitan Status and Region, 1990–2016

“…Another compositional change that is related to both mortality and changing characteristics of the population is educational attainment—one of the strongest predictors of mortality at the individual level (Elo ; Hendi , ; Montez, Zajacova, and Hayward ; Sheehan, Montez, and Sasson ). Both metro and nonmetro areas witnessed increases in the educational attainments of their residents between 1990 and 2015.…”

“…At the same time, there have been large and growing geographic and socioeconomic inequalities in health and mortality within the United States (Fenelon ; Wang et al. ; Hendi , ; Chetty et al. ; Montez, Sasson, and Hayward ).…”

“…Several recent studies of the national‐level mortality stagnation have documented adverse mortality trends among middle‐aged non‐Hispanic whites (Kochanek, Arias, and Bastian ; Squires and Blumenthal ; Case and Deaton ), particularly among women (Astone, Martin, and Aron ; Gelman and Auerbach ; Kochanek et al. ) and those with lower levels of education (Hendi ) and income (Chetty et al. ).…”

The Contribution of Drug Overdose to Educational Gradients in Life Expectancy in the United States, 1992–2011

“…I use the NHIS because calculating education-specific death rates from death certificates and census population counts is problematic due to dual data source bias from education misreporting on death certificates (Hendi 2016; Rostron, Boies, and Arias 2010; Sorlie and Johnson 1996). The NHIS is representative of the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population.…”

Falsifying cosmological models based on a non-linear electrodynamics

“…In this scenario the NEF can be considered as a source of the gravitational field and, as a consequence, nonlinear magnetic fields may be a driven mechanism of the inflation of the Universe. In this line of research, very recently many NED models have been investigated using a stochastic magnetic background, i. e. the cosmic background with the wavelength smaller than the curvature, with a non-vanishing < B 2 >, where matter should be identified with a primordial plasma [5,6,8,[12][13][14]16,64]. Thermal fluctuations in a dissipative plasma, i.e.…”