American men and women who dropped out before graduating from high school are losing years of life expectancy, researchers have discovered.
They don’t know why. Those with a college degree or more are living longer. The population as a whole keeps gaining a year or two of life. But the under-educated are dying earlier. The sharpest drop was found in white women. They seemed to have lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008 — a relatively short period and a shocking step backward in life expectancy.
The research into causes has yet to be done, so public health experts are guessing. Women without a high school diploma tend to smoke more. They are more likely to be overweight. Because their group tends to be poorer than the general population, they are less likely to have health insurance.
Comparative genetic studies have not been made.
A deeper look into the studies shows that the comparison between white women without a high school diploma and those with a college degree or more is even more dramatic: 73.5 years of life in comparison to 83.9 years. White men who dropped out have a life expectancy of 67.5 years in comparison to 80.4 years for a man with a college degree or better.
In comparisons with other nations, U.S. women fell to 41st place in the United Nations rankings, down from 14th place in 1985. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.
Studies at Harvard, the University of Colorado, the American Cancer Society, the MacArthur Foundation and other institutions produced similar facts.
IT IS EASY to see why the U.S. suffers in comparison with other developed countries in life expectancy. The United States is the only rich country in the world without a universal health care system. Poor men and women without health insurance in the U.S. are also without adequate health care.
But there is more to these tragic numbers than that.
Perhaps the greatest failure of our political and social structure is that it has produced a large underclass. There are far too many Americans without adequate housing; without an education; without decent clothing or a healthy diet; without a full time job; without prospects for a good life.
When sociologists and public health experts complete their studies and learn why the under-educated are losing years of life, they will doubtless discover that part of the answer is because they have lived in America’s gutters, so to speak, and had to struggle to keep body and soul together. The effort to merely exist takes a fearful toll on these forgotten Americans who are largely invisible to most of us.
This is one of the ways that the United States of America is exceptional.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
