Educational Attainment and Adult Mortality

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, adult mortality rates in the United States and in all high-income countries exhibited impressive declines. The latter half of the twentieth century was characterized by well-documented differences in adult mortality rates across categories of educational attainment (Elo and Preston 1996; Kitagawa and Hauser 1973; Lauderdale 2001; Rogers et al. 2000), a social fact that now garners much greater concern and research attention than perhaps ever before.