Life Expectancy In the U.S. By Education Level
Maybe there are some here who are not byte speakers.I think that people on most dating services believe that men live about five years less, on the average, than do women in the U.S. Yet the lifespans of men and women differ in different areas of the country. Life expectancy is also greater for people with college degrees, or
graduate degrees.
The data does not necessarily mean that if you are a woman aged 80.8 or a man 75.6 years old that you are going to die very soon. There is such a thing as a normal distribution, so that when you have a huge number of people, half of men, for example, will live longer than 75.6 and half will live less than that.
Genetics, life styles and social-environmental effects all contribute to one's lifespan. Social class is a factor in how long you will live.
I did a search on Google for data showing exactly how long Americans in different social classes live. The information I found clearly says that the higher your income and the more years of education you have, the longer you are expected to live - on the average.
But I did not find a site which clearly says how long in years college educated Americans are expected to live as compared to those without college educations. I am not sure why this is. I did find a lot of poor presentation of the data on these sites.
On
The U.S. life expectancy in 2005-2010 is 80.8 years for women and 75.6 for men. This life expectancy is an average for all males and females.
In Japan the male life expectancy is 79.0 and for females it is 86.1.
Quotes: "The study found that between 1993 and 2001, the ratio of the all cause
death rate in people with less than 12 years versus greater than or
equal to 16 years of education significantly increased in white and
black men, and in white women, indicating that those with a college
education or better had an increased life expectancy."
"Interestingly, the decrease in all cause death rates among men became
larger with each additional increment of educational attainment (i.e.
12 years of education vs. 13 — 15 years vs. greater than or equal to
16 years). In women, this affect was only observed with greater than
or equal to 16 years of education."
My comment: Here is an example of ambiguous, poor writing and
reporting. I think the above paragraph says that for men the increase
in life span is greater the greater the number of years of education
the man has had. But it is not certain that education level is the
only cause of increased life span for more educated men. it could
also be that those who are college graduates and/or have graduate
degrees have better genes, that is,they probably had grandparents who
lived longer.
The question is how long do men and women with college degrees live as
compared with those who do not have college degrees.
March 11, 2008
Quotes: "The new data from Harvard Medical School and Harvard University
demonstrate that individuals with more than 12 years of education have
significantly longer life expectancy than those who never went beyond
high school. Overall in the groups studied, as of 2000, better
educated at age 25 could expect to live to age 82; for less educated,
75."
Based on some data, this site asks a number of
questions about you and comes up with a possible life expectancy:
Mine was 89.
Comments (6)
Take it as it comes.
Living in small town and rural Missouri, one gets a very different impression of how long men live. You just don't see men in their late seventies or eighties here, or meet them anywhere. Apparently fewer live that long in this part of America. The few men that old that are around don't show up in public or reveal that they are here.
Also, on dating services women - even those in their sixties or early to mid seventies - tend to reject men on those sites who are in their seventies. They believe men that old are ready to die.
Although young people on this site may not be interested, the information saying that people who have college degrees live longer is something few people know. Beating stereotypes over the head and defeating conventional "wisdom" is always interesting to me.
More interestingly I read a genetics report recently which suggested that the first person who would live to be 1,000 had probably already been born.
It is like with the AIDS virus, if you have the cash to invest in a healthy lifestyle and treatment you can still last for a number of years, if your're poor and have AIDS your future looks pretty bleak.