- From a layman's perspective, it seems like it's mostly an expected outcome of college degrees becoming a class signifier. In 1990, only a fifth of American adults had bachelor's degrees, with those who held them making 70% more than high school graduates. A sizeable gap, sure, but those non-college graduates have minimum wage retail workers and general laborers, and union steel and auto workers in the same educational bucket.
By 2020, it had risen to well over a third of Americans who had bachelor's, and 105% more income for those with them. One might expect a dilution in a degree's value, but I think it's just a matter of minimum wage workers still being high school graduates, whereas virtually all professional workers (including the increasingly few manufacturing workers) needing a bachelor's to get past the first stage of HR.
[1] https://educationdata.org/education-attainment-statistics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
- As I understand the data in this article, midlife mortality rates for those who hold college degrees has declined from 1992 to 2019, whereas the rate has remained largely stable for non-college degree holders.
I wonder if this trend is due, in part, to college degree holders becoming disproportionately female over time, and women having lower midlife mortality rates? https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/degrees-1.png
by kazinator
3 subcomments
- > Less well-understood is why “place effects” matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree.
Let me take a crack at it: people with college degrees tend to be found in populous places and spaces where smoking is prohibited. Plus, social pressure; lighting up a cigarette in certain company is almost like hurling a racist insult.
Just to get through college with a cigarette habit would have been a pain in the ass. You can't be darting outside N times during lectures or exams to have a smoke. If you can even do that; a lot of colleges nowadays have even outdoor smoking bans, no? That's sort of a place effect: college graduates spend a bunch of time in certain places where smoking would have been inconvenient to the point of making some people quit.
by Alive-in-2025
1 subcomments
- It's access to good health in midlife. I know people who have tests, good healthcare, I can afford it, both with time off and with my healthcare coverage itself and the cost of other optional tests.
- "Abstract. The education-mortality gradient has increased sharply in the last three decades, with the life-expectancy gap between people with and without a college degree widening from 2.6 years in 1992 to 6.3 years in 2019 (Case and Deaton 2023). During the same period, mortality inequality across counties rose 30 percent, accompanied by an increasing rural health penalty. Using county- and state-level data from the 1992–2019 period, we demonstrate that these three trends arose due to a fundamental shift in the geographic patterns of mortality among college and non-college populations. First, we find a sharp decline in both mortality rates and geographic inequality for college graduates. Second, the reverse was true for people without a college degree; spatial inequality became amplified. Third, we find that rates of smoking play a key role in explaining all three empirical puzzles, with secondary roles attributed to income, other health behaviors, and state policies. Less well-understood is why 'place effects' matter so much for smoking (and mortality) for those without a college degree."
by anArbitraryOne
0 subcomment
- So it's basically saying that smoking is a proximal cause of mortality, and locale is a distal cause of smoking, intensified by not having a college degree?
by carabiner
1 subcomments
- K-shaped growth, dual economy, permanent underclass what ever you want to call it, shapes all aspects of life.
by newspaper1
5 subcomments
- If you have a college degree, you might be able to work from home and not take your life in your hands twice a day on a freeway of death. If you don't have a college degree, you probably have to commute. If you live in a rural area you probably have to commute long distances, with low lighting on potentially icy and twisty single lane roads with oncoming traffic. In all the discussions of RTO vs WFH you almost never see safety mentioned, but it's an incredible upside to not having to drive to and from work every day.
by neuroelectron
1 subcomments
- Boomers need to be kept unaware of how everything is changing for the worse or they might vote differently
- [dead]
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