The implications of changing education distributions for life expectancy gradients

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113712Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • Relative education and relative mortality have a negative logarithmic relationship.

  • We develop a new method for computing life expectancy by exact education quantile.

  • Educational expansion is partly responsible for growing inequality in mortality.

  • These findings hold in both the U.S. and Finland, two very different contexts.

Abstract

Recent research has proposed that shifting education distributions across cohorts are influencing estimates of educational gradients in mortality. We use data from the United States and Finland covering four decades to explore this assertion. We base our analysis around our new finding: a negative logarithmic relationship between relative education and relative mortality. This relationship holds across multiple age groups, both sexes, two very different countries, and time periods spanning four decades. The inequality parameters from this model indicate increasing relative mortality differentials over time. We use these findings to develop a method that allows us to compute life expectancy for any given segment of the education distribution (e.g., education quintiles). We apply this method to Finnish and American data to compute life expectancy gradients that are adjusted for changes in the education distribution. In Finland, these distribution-adjusted education differentials in life expectancy between the top and bottom education quintiles have increased by two years for men, and remained stable for women between 1971 and 2010. Similar distribution-adjusted estimates for the U.S. suggest that educational disparities in life expectancy increased by 3.3 years for non-Hispanic white men and 3.0 years for non-Hispanic white women between the 1980s and 2000s. For men and women, respectively, these differentials between the top and bottom education quintiles are smaller than the differentials between the top and bottom education categories by 18% and 39% in the U.S. and by 39% and 100% in Finland. Had the relative inequality parameters of mortality governing the Finnish and U.S. populations remained constant at their earliest period values, the difference in life expectancy between the top and bottom education quintiles would – because of overall mortality reductions – have declined moderately. The findings suggest that educational expansion may bias estimates of trends in educational differences in life expectancy upwards.

Keywords

Mortality
Inequality
Demography
Slope index of inequality
Life expectancy
Education

Cited by (0)

This research was supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (No 74439), the National Institute on Aging (T32 AG000139, R01 AG060115, and P30 AG012836), and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Population Research Infrastructure Program (R24 HD044964, P2C HD047879). PM was supported by the Academy of Finland. The authors thank Jessica Y. Ho and Ryan Masters, as well as participants at the Ohio State University PRI seminar, NBER Cohort Studies Meeting, Yale CERSI seminar, Duke DuPRI T32 Luncheon, and Princeton CHW seminar for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.