Two Princeton economists, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, spent years counting American deaths. Their 2021 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences worked through 48.9 million death certificates and asked a plain question. How many years can a 25-year-old expect to live before turning 75, and does the answer change with a bachelor’s degree?
It changes more than almost anything else they measured.
From 1990 to 2010, adults with degrees and adults without them were both gaining life expectancy. The degree holders gained faster, but everyone was moving in the right direction. After 2010 the lines split. Mortality kept falling for adults with a bachelor’s degree. For everyone else, decades of improvement went into reverse.
By 2021, in follow-up data Case and Deaton presented, the difference in expected lifespan between the two groups had stretched to roughly eight and a half years.
Part of the gap comes from what the researchers named deaths of despair. Drug overdoses, suicide, alcoholic liver disease, all concentrated heavily among adults without degrees. Part comes from slower progress against heart disease in that same group. And underneath both sits the job market. Deaton put it directly: “Good jobs have become increasingly rare for workers without a college diploma, many of whom have lost their jobs to globalization and automation.”
What the diploma does and doesn’t do
Be careful with a finding like this. Nobody ran an experiment handing out degrees at random, so researchers won’t call it simple cause and effect, and neither should we. The paper on your wall doesn’t protect anything by itself.
What the degree buys is where the protection lives. Steadier employment. Employer health insurance without coverage gaps between jobs. Work that wears out your back and knees more slowly. Income with enough margin that a $1,000 emergency is an annoyance instead of a crisis. Each of those has its own well-documented link to living longer, and the bachelor’s degree is the door most of them sit behind.
The degree also travels with other advantages, family money among them, and the researchers are upfront that they can’t fully separate the strands. So the honest answer to the question in the headline is a qualified yes. The two Americas in the death records are divided by the bachelor’s degree, and the mechanisms behind the divide are mostly things a degree provides.
If you’re thinking about going back
One caution I want to be straight about. Most people in this data earned their degrees young. I haven’t seen research that isolates what a degree earned at 40 does to your life expectancy, so I won’t pretend to know the size of the effect for a returning student.
But look at the list of mechanisms again. A steadier job. Benefits. Work that’s easier on your body. More margin when something breaks. Those are the exact reasons adults give for going back to school in the first place. The mortality research doesn’t add a new reason. It reveals how much weight the old reasons were already carrying.
The part I find sobering is the direction. The gap widened for thirty years straight, and nothing in the recent data shows it turning around. Whatever you decide about school, decide it knowing the stakes run well past the paycheck.
