Measuring Recent Apparent Declines In Longevity: The Role Of Increasing Educational Attainment.

ABSTRACT: Independent researchers have reported an alarming decline in life expectancy after 1990 among US non-Hispanic whites with less than a high school education. However, US educational attainment rose dramatically during the twentieth century; thus, focusing on changes in mortality rates of those not completing high school means looking at a different, shrinking, and increasingly vulnerable segment of the population in each year. We analyzed US data to examine the robustness of earlier findings categorizing education in terms of relative rank in the overall distribution of each birth cohort, instead of by credentials such as high school graduation. Estimating trends in mortality for the bottom quartile, we found little evidence that survival probabilities declined dramatically. We conclude tha

SUBMITTER: Bound J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4783133 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature