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The Significance of Education for Mortality Compression in the United States

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Demography

Abstract

Recent studies of old-age mortality trends assess whether longevity improvements over time are linked to increasing compression of mortality at advanced ages. The historical backdrop of these studies is the long-term improvement in a population’s socioeconomic resources that fueled longevity gains. We extend this line of inquiry by examining whether socioeconomic differences in longevity within a population are accompanied by old-age mortality compression. Specifically, we document educational differences in longevity and mortality compression for older men and women in the United States. Drawing on the fundamental cause of disease framework, we hypothesize that both longevity and compression increase with higher levels of education and that women with the highest levels of education will exhibit the greatest degree of longevity and compression. Results based on the Health and Retirement Study and the National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File confirm a strong educational gradient in both longevity and mortality compression. We also find that mortality is more compressed within educational groups among women than men. The results suggest that educational attainment in the United States maximizes life chances by delaying the biological aging process.

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Notes

  1. Véron and Rohrbasser (2003) provide a detailed account of the approach taken by Lexis (1878).

  2. Lexis maintained that premature and normal deaths are etiologically distinct, but recognized that in practice, distinguishing between premature and normal deaths in the transitional region of the curve is difficult.

  3. We also estimated models that included all racial/ethnic groups (available on request). Although our substantive conclusions remain unchanged, in the models including all racial/ethnic groups, the modal ages of death were 0.09–0.81 years lower, and the SD above the mode were 0.08–0.34 higher, than those presented in Table 3.

  4. We also estimated a series of logit models to examine the sensitivity of our results to the model specification. The results from the logit and Gompertz models were virtually identical and did not alter our substantive conclusions. For example, depending on the data set and gender, the logit model produced modes that were 0.15–0.36 years higher and SD above the mode that were 0.07–0.18 years lower than those shown in Table 3.

  5. Eakin and Witten (1995) suggested normalizing age and the probability of survival to better facilitate interpretations over time and between different populations. Given that the current analyses are cross-sectional, this is technically not necessary. We do it, nonetheless, in the event that other researchers would like to compare their results with those presented herein. The results are interpreted the same regardless of whether normalization is performed.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a research grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (1 R01-HD053696, PI Robert A. Hummer) and by infrastructure (5 R24 HD042849) and training (5 T32 HD007081) grants awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Health and Child Development. The authors would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers and members of the health and mortality research group at the UT Population Research Center for their helpful suggestions and comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, 110 Inner Campus Drive Stop G1800, Austin, TX, 78712-1699, USA

    Dustin C. Brown

  2. Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Mark D. Hayward, Robert A. Hummer & Chi-Tsun Chiu

  3. Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Jennifer Karas Montez

  4. Institute of Public and International Affairs, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Mira M. Hidajat

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  1. Dustin C. Brown
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  2. Mark D. Hayward
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  5. Chi-Tsun Chiu
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Correspondence to Dustin C. Brown.

Appendix

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Table 4 Characteristics of the analytic samples in the HRS and NHIS-LMF
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Brown, D.C., Hayward, M.D., Montez, J.K. et al. The Significance of Education for Mortality Compression in the United States. Demography 49, 819–840 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0104-1

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