The Role of Changing Education Composition in Growing Educational Mortality Inequalities in the US

Wen Su , University of Oxford
Jesus-Daniel Zazueta-Borboa, University of Oxford
Jennifer Dowd, University of Oxford

Educational inequalities in mortality in the US have grown considerably over the past decades. Interpreting trends in educational inequalities in mortality over time is challenging because period trends cannot distinguish changes in access to each level of education from widening social disparities in underlying mortality risk. Building on previous work by Hendi et al. that assumes a monotonic association between relative education and mortality risk at each age, we propose a method that decomposes trends in education-specific life expectancy into 1) contributions from changes in age- and education-specific mortality rates, holding constant educational composition, and 2) contributions from changes in education composition holding constant mortality risk. We apply the method to US data on education and mortality from 2000-2019, finding that changes in composition contributed most to stagnating life expectancy among those with some college, while mortality improvements outpaced impacts of negative selection for those with a university education.

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 Presented in Session 38. Flash Session Social Inequalities in Mortality