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Life expectancy in the United States has fallen in recent years, from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.6 in 2018. The same thing happened in England, where the mortality rate has been reduced by five months. Even for countries where the mortality rate has been increasing, such as France and Germany, the mortality rate in those countries has grown more slowly than in previous years.
According to a study led by Yale University School of Medicine and the University of Alabama-Birmingham, a person’s level of education may be an indicator of their life expectancy. The researchers analyzed the relationship between the life expectancy rate and level of knowledge of 5114 people in the United States for 30 years, beginning when most of the test subjects were about 20 years old. The study focused on sex, race, and educational level achieved among people in two age groups, those aged 18 to 24 and those between the ages of 25 and 30.
Since the analysis began in 1985, 395 people have died. Of those who died before the age of 60, 13% had a high school education, at most. By comparison, only 5% of people with a university degree died before the age of 60. The researchers also found that the difference between ethnic longevity and educational level disappeared through the length of the study. Of those deceased with only a high school degree, 13.5% were people of color, and 13.2% were white. For those with a college degree, 5.9% of those who died were black, and 4.3% were white.
In conducting the study, the researchers used the YPLL index (Years of potential life lost), which calculates the average number of years someone would have lived if they had not had a premature death. The measure is used to compare how untimely death was, for example, if a 25-year-old is killed, he accumulates more YPLL points than someone who dies at 50 from cardiovascular problems.
The YPLL points are essential in the study as they served to predict life expectancy and what factor affects the calculation the most, namely, income, ethnicity, education, or other. Thus, the researchers were able to determine that the best indicator predicting YPLL is the level of knowledge of a person.
Throughout the study, the authors were surprised to discover the impact that education can have on the YPLL estimate because, for each stage of education attained, the participants added 1.37 years to their life expectancy. Throughout the 30 years of studying the participants, researchers noted the importance of improving access to quality lifelong education and how this helps reduce the mortality rate.
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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