Staying Alive in America: Bachelor’s Degree Preferred

The mortality gap between Americans with bachelor’s degrees and those with no college education bulged starting in 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic started, according to two economists.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton report in a new working paper that the difference in years of expected life at age 25 between these two groups increased to 6.9 years in 2021, from 5 years in 2019, and just 2.6 years in 1992.

For 25-year-old men, the education-related adult life expectancy difference climbed to 8.3 years in 2021, from 6.3 years in 2019, and 4.2 years in 1992.

The difference means that, in 2021, a 25-year-old man could hope to live to an average age of 79 if he had a bachelor’s degree, and only to an average age of 71 if he had no college education.

Case and Deaton — who are famous for their research on the economics of death — say the gap appears to be increasing because of a combination of differences in access to health care, underlying differences between people with college degrees and other people, and other factors, such as the strength of social welfare programs.

“While mortality rates and mortality trends for less- and more-educated people in other rich countries differ in both levels and trends, the U.S. appears to be the only western country where life expectancies are trending in different directions,” Case and Deaton write.

What It Means

For agents and advisors, the growing education-based mortality gap could complicate efforts to find adequate, reasonably priced life insurance for clients without a college degree, and it could also complicate efforts to allocate assets to annuities or make other retirement income planning choices.

For financial professionals helping clients with children in high school, the gap may complicate college planning.

Today, some critics are questioning the economic value of a bachelor’s degree. But decisions to skip college could be more painful if future research confirms that a 25-year-old man with no degree is giving up an average of eight years of life.

The Researchers

Case has been a member of the Princeton economics faculty since 1991.

Deaton has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1983, and he has served as a professor of economics at the University of Southern California since 2017.

He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015 for his research on how poor people make economic choices.

A History of Mortality Research

Case and Deaton attracted national attention in 2015 with a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on an increase in the mortality rate for middle-aged, white, non-Hispanic Americans.

In that paper, and in discussions after the paper was published, Case and Deaton drew attention to the idea that “deaths of despair,” or deaths related to factors such as suicide and substance use disorders, are an important factor in explaining growing differences in the death rates for higher-income, higher-wealth, better-educated people in the United States and other U.S. residents.

In 2021,  the economists published a PNAS paper showing that U.S. life expectancy fell between 1992 and 2018 for adults without bachelor’s degrees, while the gaps between life expectancy for white U.S. residents and other U.S. residents narrowed.

The New Paper

The new Case-Deaton paper is a working paper published on the website of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

A working paper is a research paper that has not yet gone through a full peer review process.

The researchers started with death certificate data and data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and American Community Survey programs.

They focused on figures for life expectancy at age 25 because of a belief that most Americans have completed any undergraduate college education they will get by age 25.

They found that the education-related mortality gaps for women were smaller than the gaps for men.

For 25-year-old women, the gap between expected years of life for women with a bachelor’s degree and women with no college education increased to 5.2 years in 2021, from 3.8 years in 2019 and 1.6 years in 1992.

Phantom Degrees

Case and Deaton also talk about the data for people who have some college education, but not a bachelor’s degree, and for people who seem to be lying about having a bachelor’s degree.

“In previous work, we have shown that socioeconomic outcomes and mortality patterns for those with some college, but no BA, are more similar to those with a high school degree or less than to those with a college degree,” the economists write.

Case and Deaton note that, over time, the percentage of people born in a particular year who tell the Census Bureau that they have a bachelor’s degree increases more than mortality data, adult education program data and immigration data suggest that it should increase.

For people born in 1970 (Generation X), for example, the percentage of people who said they had a bachelor’s degree increased by 14 percentage points between 1995 and 2021.

“We are left with the supposition that people are granting themselves degrees as they age,” the researchers say. “There are certainly great incentives to do so, and perhaps few risks to people checking a box on a website for jobs in the hope that prospective employers will not check.”

The economists suggest that studies of the effect of phantom degrees on wages imply that lying about having a college degree might be helpful.

“Many people who falsely claim to have a degree may still receive the social and economic benefits of having one,” they conclude.

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