The Role Of Education In An Individual’s Longevity
Life expectancy is how long you could expect an average person to live. It is calculated by the person’s country of origin, the average living conditions in the country of origin. When a country develops economically, people have a longer life expectancy. Development experts believed that having more money means people can live longer. However, a new study suggests that education may have a bigger role in increasing one’s life expectancy. In 1975, economists that plotted rising life expectancies because of a countries’ wealth, has concluded that wealth has a major influence in increasing longevity. The idea is self-supported: everything people need to survive and stay healthy like food and healthcare costs money. We know that in order to live a long life, we need healthcare and food that costs money. But do other aspects have an effect on longevity too? Does education play a bigger role in an individual’s longevity?
In 2008, Harvard Medical School carried out a study/research where they looked into life expectancy in the United States and what was increasing the average life expectancy. The research was conducted by Cutler and Ellen Meara, the assistant professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School. They say that over the years, much attention was directed at mortality rates based on socio-economic status, but there was lesser amount of attention has been paid towards recent trends of mortality rates, life expectancy and education. To understand mortality trends, Meara and Cutler combined death certificate data with census population estimates and data from the National Longitudal Mortality Study. Restricting analyses to whites and non-Hispanic blacks, the team created to separate data sets, one covering from 1981 to 1988 and the other covering from 1990 to 2000. In both data sets, life expectancy rose for individuals who had more than 12 years of education. For those with 12 years or less, it plateaued. For example, comparing the 1980s to the 1990s, better educated individuals experienced nearly a year and a half of increased life expectancy, whereas the lesser educated experienced only half a year. For 1990-2000, life expectancy rose an additional 1.6 years for the better educated, while remaining fixed for the lesser educated. Additionally, when they broke the data down by gender, they had found that women had lower rates of life expectancy than men. Women that are lesser educated experienced a slight drop in life expectancy at the age of 25. 'Although improvements in health often occur more rapidly within some groups than others, it is surprising that life expectancy remained so flat for the less educated during periods when others enjoyed dramatic gains in longevity,' says Meara. The researchers have found that a decent amount of the mortality gap can be attributed to smoking related illnesses. Only two diseases that are usually caused by smoking, lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, account for twenty percent of increasing mortality differences in the 90s.
Other illnesses like heart/cardiovascular diseases and other types of cancer, also count smoking as contributing factors. The kind of people that smoke is not very surprising, because educated people smoke to the same extent as lesser educated people. Another article published on the New York Times website by Austin Frakt, the director of the Partnered Evidence-Based Policy Resource Center at the V.A. Boston Healthcare System, associate professor with Boston University’s School of Public Health, and adjunct associate professor with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, states that “education is associated with improved health outcomes, but trying to figure out whether if education has any direct effect can be tricky”. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention people with some college education have mortality rates less than half of those with no college education. Additionally, people who are educated seem to have less anxiety and depression, lesser functional limits than those who are not as educated and are less likely to have a serious health condition like diabetes. One study by U.C.L.A economist Adriana Lleras-Muney, relied on state compulsory education laws that were introduced and enacted between 1915 to 1939. These laws required some children to get education more than they may have otherwise. This results in longer lives of those that did so. The study states that have an additional one year of education increased life expectancy at the age of 35 by around 1.7 years in the year 1960. Other studies that relied on inducements for better education because of the poor labor market or as a method of avoiding the Vietnam draft at the time found that an increased amount of education led to improved health and a lower probability of smoking. This is one clue about how better education results in improved health due to fact that educated people have a lower chance of engaging in risky behaviors.
A higher education results in better jobs that pay more and money is correlated with better health. Much of income’s effect on health seems to come from childhood. Many studies show that children with wealthier parents are usually in better health because the parents have better access to prenatal care and nutrition. Additionally, children with wealthier parents are more likely to obtain better education and have higher incomes themselves. Because of this, a healthier childhood often means a healthier adulthood. Greater education and wealth is also associated with social status, which has also been linked to health. A landmark study that was published in 1978 found that higher-ranking British civil servants had lower mortality rates than lower-ranking ones because the lower-ranking ones had higher blood pressure, blood sugar and had smoked more. Many other studies and investigations have replicated this relationship. An intriguing hypothesis that connects social status and health is that people that have lower status is under more stress than high-ranking people. One study linked childhood poverty to chronic stress and reduced memory, which affect education, wealth and possibly even health. Research suggests that even the stress that is endured by a woman during pregnancy can permanently affect the health of the fetus. Health can also vary by race and ethnicity, which also play a big role in social status. For example, African-Americans have higher rates of mortality than White Americans, because African-American infants are more likely to be born preterm and lighter than White American infants. Another reason African-Americans have a higher mortality rate is because they may have lesser amount of access to prenatal care. They also have a lower chance of receiving health care and are more likely to live in areas with worse doctors and hospitals. This is because of a history of discrimination and community segregation. However, Hispanics are usually healthier than non-Hispanic White Americans, even though they are poorer than average. This could be because Hispanics are less likely to drink or smoke than White Americans.
There aren’t any specific sources for whether education affects life expectancy in Mongolia. But it seems that education doesn’t actually contribute to life expectancy as much as in other countries. Mongolia is ranked as 9th to 12th place in average IQ by numerous sources in 2019. Mongolia is ranked as 161th place with an average life expectancy of 70.78 years in 2019. The reason why Mongolia’s average life expectancy is low is because Mongolia is not a very well developed country. Mongolia has a measly 4,104 USD GDP per capita (nominal) and is ranked 145th for health care. This means the life expectancy in Mongolia is low not because of education, but because Mongolia’s GDP per capita is not very high and the health care is only 145th for best health care. Mongolia isn’t like the United States or the United Kingdom, where education has a clear effect on longevity, but Mongolia has a high IQ but has a low life expectancy due to the fact that Mongolia’s GDP per capita and even just overall GDP is fairly low. The health care in Mongolia is not exactly world class either.
There is no specific problem I am writing about in this essay. I don’t know what to do in this part because I couldn’t attend Global Perspectives class last week, I hope you can understand. In conclusion, education does seem to have an influencing role in an individual’s longevity. Education also seems to affect longevity indirectly (e.g. getting a better job, being less likely to be risky, etc.). However, in Mongolia education doesn’t seem to have as much as an effect on longevity as other countries. The reason life expectancy in Mongolia is very low is because Mongolia has a low GDP per capita and doesn’t have very high ranking health care.
Bibliography
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/2166833-more-education-is-what-makes-people-live-longer-not-more-money/#targetText=When%20countries%20develop%20economically%2C%20people,implications%20for%20public%20health%20spending.
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080311081149.htm
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2372732214549754
- http://www.geoba.se/population.php?pc=world&type=15&year=2019&st=rank&asde=&page=2
- http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/average-iq-by-country/
- https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
- https://forbes.com/sites/duncanmadden/2019/01/11/ranked-the-25-smartest-countries-in-the-world
