From a layman's perspective, it seems like it's mostly an expected outcome of college degrees becoming a class signifier. In 1990, only a fifth of American adults had bachelor's degrees, with those who held them making 70% more than high school graduates. A sizeable gap, sure, but those non-college graduates have minimum wage retail workers and general laborers, and union steel and auto workers in the same educational bucket.
By 2020, it had risen to well over a third of Americans who had bachelor's, and 105% more income for those with them. One might expect a dilution in a degree's value, but I think it's just a matter of minimum wage workers still being high school graduates, whereas virtually all professional workers (including the increasingly few manufacturing workers) needing a bachelor's to get past the first stage of HR.
I don't follow? If the population of college educated adults is growing, it's by definition becoming less selective and would be expected to show less skew. College educated people used to be a "special" demographic, now they're much closer to the rest of society. But the data shows the opposite effect, with the lifespan benefit of a degree more than doubling.
I think there is something to be said about provenance of the degree. For example there's been quite a lot of expansion in number of colleges or even community colleges expanding their systems while actual prestigious colleges themselves have only expanded so much.
Here are the stats for Harvard enrollment of undergrads (1,3), along with US population (2,4) and percent Harvard student (not sure where I get number of people in the workforce with harvard degrees data but maybe this is a decent proxy):
Year - ugrads - US population - % of US pop at harvard
Let me just write this down… Just for illustration, assume average lifespan of poor person is 60 and average lifespan of rich person is 80, 30% of the population is from the rich person group and rest from the poor person group, and these two facts hold for current time and the 90s.
Let’s say currently, every rich person goes to college, so college to non-college lifespan is 80:60.
While in the 90s, let’s say 20% goes to college and every college going person is rich. Then the lifespan of college going person would still be 80 and non-college going person would be more than 60.
So, another way of looking at it is that the non-college going population is getting to be the special demographic whose statistics are getting skewed, though I’m not sure that’s the correct way of looking at it.
It might be a skewed distribution where life expectancy drops off rapidly below the median but isn’t that different at the top. So it’s not a big difference when it’s the bottom 90% and the top 10%, but it is when it’s the bottom 60% versus the top 40%.
As I understand the data in this article, midlife mortality rates for those who hold college degrees has declined from 1992 to 2019, whereas the rate has remained largely stable for non-college degree holders.
It's exactly these kind of issues with statistics that cause us all kinds of problems. I'm glad you pointed this one out.
It reminds me of a YT video I was watching with similar issues about cancer mortality rates. We've been doing all these treatments, and cancer survival rates have been going up. So everybody cheers about how good the treatments are. But when you control for the fact that earlier detection puts more people into the 'cancer' category earlier, causing 'cancer' people to live statistically longer from diagnosis, then the benefits of the treatments mostly go away (for many but not all types of cancer).
And these kinds of misleading issues are all throughout statistics. See Simpson's paradox, etc.
This seems like an extremely broad brush. There are cancers that were literally untreatable and guaranteed death within years, that with treatment now can see patients living 5+ years. Lung cancer specifically, but others as well.
Given that Americans with and without college degrees are split pretty much 50/50, then we’d expect there to be an equal increase in non-college degrees holder mortality rates if this was caused by changing who got degrees.
I suppose it’s possible that the gender ratio change is the cause of half of the mortality decrease, and the other half is a broad decrease in mortality rates. That would cause it to cancel out in non-college degrees holder mortality holders and double in college degree holders.
Not just more female, but also a broader proportion of the population in total. You'd need to control for these effects to draw any conclusions at all.
> Less well-understood is why “place effects” matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
Your argument as it stands would explain why people with college degrees smoke a lot less than people without them. But that's not what the "place effects" is in the article. "Place effects" is the fact that, if we just look at non-college-graduates, the ones who live in rural areas smoke more and have lower life expectancy than the ones who live in urban areas.
The latter effect, I think, can be explained by an argument that's similar to yours: even for non-college graduates, it's a lot more inconvenient to be a smoker in urban areas than in rural areas. You're much more likely to find smoking banned inside the places you go, and to face social disapproval if you try to smoke outdoors in public spaces.
What eras? I went to college in a non-populous place circa ~2001-2005 and in our state smoking bans were just starting to roll out then. Smoking was an everyone thing, and it was normal to go to smokey places on a regular basis even if you didn't smoke. That was nuts and bad of course, but it was normalized.
It's access to good health in midlife. I know people who have tests, good healthcare, I can afford it, both with time off and with my healthcare coverage itself and the cost of other optional tests.
We need to fix this problem and provide great health care to all. Half the country seems to think it's some kind of impossible communism country destroying things to give everyone good health care like every other developed country. How can it be that Republicans keep convincing their voters if this? Raise taxes a little on the wealthy, go to single payer
"Abstract. The education-mortality gradient has increased sharply in the last three decades, with the life-expectancy gap between people with and without a college degree widening from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019 (Case and Deaton 2023). During the same period, mortality inequality across counties rose 30 percent, accompanied by an increasing rural health penalty. Using county- and state-level data from the 1992–2019 period, we demonstrate that these three trends arose due to a fundamental shift in the geographic patterns of mortality among college and non-college populations. First, we find a sharp decline in both mortality rates and geographic inequality for college graduates. Second, the reverse was true for people without a college degree; spatial inequality became amplified. Third, we find that rates of smoking play a key role in explaining all three empirical puzzles, with secondary roles attributed to income, other health behaviors, and state policies. Less well-understood is why 'place effects' matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree."
Actually, later in their paper they say: "Although we have argued for a causal role for smoking in generating these patterns, the growing mortality gaps still seem too large and the causes of death too varied to blame the patterns on the adverse health effects of tobacco use alone. As noted above, smoking is likely
to play a role in amplifying the impact of other factors adversely affecting midlife mortality, such as the marketing efforts by opioid manufacturers targeted to areas with high rates of smoking-related illness, coupled with epigenetic changes making smokers more susceptible to opioid use disorders. Still, the strength of our findings that smoking is predictive of spatial trends in midlife mortality points towards different mechanisms needed to explain
the troubling trends that have unfolded since 1990."
So it's basically saying that smoking is a proximal cause of mortality, and locale is a distal cause of smoking, intensified by not having a college degree?
Call it what it actually is: societal abuse from wealthy oligarchs with their masks removed. One man bought up all the RAM on planet Earth, and everyone's like "lol I guess computers are just expensive now".
For Second-Handers the value of DRAM collapses past 256K anyway. I'd rather the people who can actually use it get societies resources than bums who use it to play games and crap out dumb scribbles or "vfx"
Second-Handers love to denigrate the work of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, but these men are solving fundamental problems, you can get your DRAM on the second-hand market after Sam uses it to create AGI. A reasonable man would be very grateful for the existence of these oligarchs. I assume you are just posting unconsciously not unreasonably.
Readit News
By 2020, it had risen to well over a third of Americans who had bachelor's, and 105% more income for those with them. One might expect a dilution in a degree's value, but I think it's just a matter of minimum wage workers still being high school graduates, whereas virtually all professional workers (including the increasingly few manufacturing workers) needing a bachelor's to get past the first stage of HR.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
[1] https://educationdata.org/college-dropout-rates
Here are the stats for Harvard enrollment of undergrads (1,3), along with US population (2,4) and percent Harvard student (not sure where I get number of people in the workforce with harvard degrees data but maybe this is a decent proxy):
Year - ugrads - US population - % of US pop at harvard
1990 - 22,851 - 248,709,873 - 0.0092%
2000 - 24,279 - 281,421,906 - 0.0086%
2010 - 27,594 - 308,745,538 - 0.0089%
2025 - 24,519 - 343,000,000 - 0.0071%
1. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_312.20.a...
2. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...
3. https://www.harvard.edu/about/
4. https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Let’s say currently, every rich person goes to college, so college to non-college lifespan is 80:60.
While in the 90s, let’s say 20% goes to college and every college going person is rich. Then the lifespan of college going person would still be 80 and non-college going person would be more than 60.
So, another way of looking at it is that the non-college going population is getting to be the special demographic whose statistics are getting skewed, though I’m not sure that’s the correct way of looking at it.
I wonder if this trend is due, in part, to college degree holders becoming disproportionately female over time, and women having lower midlife mortality rates? https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/degrees-1.png
It reminds me of a YT video I was watching with similar issues about cancer mortality rates. We've been doing all these treatments, and cancer survival rates have been going up. So everybody cheers about how good the treatments are. But when you control for the fact that earlier detection puts more people into the 'cancer' category earlier, causing 'cancer' people to live statistically longer from diagnosis, then the benefits of the treatments mostly go away (for many but not all types of cancer).
And these kinds of misleading issues are all throughout statistics. See Simpson's paradox, etc.
I suppose it’s possible that the gender ratio change is the cause of half of the mortality decrease, and the other half is a broad decrease in mortality rates. That would cause it to cancel out in non-college degrees holder mortality holders and double in college degree holders.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
The latter effect, I think, can be explained by an argument that's similar to yours: even for non-college graduates, it's a lot more inconvenient to be a smoker in urban areas than in rural areas. You're much more likely to find smoking banned inside the places you go, and to face social disapproval if you try to smoke outdoors in public spaces.
Starting to wonder if the two are correlated.
We don't get a lot of press. During the first decade of the ACA we didn't exist for anyone reporting on the US healthcare system.
But our visibility has improved and some days we're almost noticed for moments at a time.
Obesity and fentanyl would be my guess.
Why is college the primary group factor…? Is there some sort of health effect of sitting college classrooms for 5 years? Seems unlikely.
College education is highly associated and predicted by income/access to wealth.
Wealth inequality seems like a more likely explanation. Not seeing how they controlled for that across college vs non-college groups.
Deleted Comment
Second-Handers love to denigrate the work of Elon Musk and Sam Altman, but these men are solving fundamental problems, you can get your DRAM on the second-hand market after Sam uses it to create AGI. A reasonable man would be very grateful for the existence of these oligarchs. I assume you are just posting unconsciously not unreasonably.