Learn How Graduating High School May Extend Your Life; Examining the Link Between Education and Mortality

Did you know that people with higher education tend to live longer than those with less education? The death gap related to education is not necessarily between college grads and non-grads, but primarily between high school dropouts and graduates.

We show you research that education may truly help us stay on the slow road to death. Show Notes: https://bit.ly/4fjYq6n

In This Episode:

• 02:55 - Recipe of the Week: Lunch Lady Peanut Butter Bars
• 03:49 - Supercentenarian Obituaries: Celebrating Ms. Virginia McLaurin 
• 06:36 - How a High School Diploma May Prevent an Early Death
• 19:46 - A Parent Saying Goodbye - A segment from the Jack Reacher novel The Enemy
• 26:35 - Outro

Transcript

Learn-How-Graduating-High-School-May-Extend-Your-Life-Examining-the-Link-Between-Education-and-Mortality

This podcast does not provide medical nor legal advice. Please listen to the complete disclosure at the end of the recording. Hello and welcome to Everyone Dies, the podcast where we talk about serious illness, dying, death, and bereavement.

I'm Marianne Matzo, a nurse practitioner, and I use my experience from working as a nurse for 46 years to help answer your questions about what happens at the end of life. And I'm Charlie Navarette, an actor in New York City and here to offer an every-person viewpoint to our podcast. We are both here because we believe that the more you know, the better prepared you are to make difficult decisions when a crisis hits.

So welcome to this week's show. Please relax, get yourself a cup of cuppa, a piece of fruit, and thank you for spending the next hour with Charlie and me as we talk about how graduating high school may prevent an early death. Like the BBC, we see our shows offering entertainment, enlightenment, and education and divide that into three halves to address each of these goals.

Our main topic is in the second half, so feel free to fast forward to that flight of ideas-free zone. In the first half, Charlie has our recipe of the week and continues his series reporting about supercentenarian obituaries. This week he's talking about Virginia McLaren, who was born in 1909 and died at age 113 in 2022.

In the second half, I'm going to talk about how the big divide on premature death isn't between college grads and non-grads, it's between high school dropouts and everyone else. And in our third half, Charlie and I have a scene about a parent saying goodbye to her children from, of all places, Lee Child's book, The Enemy, a Jack Reacher novel. So Charlie, what's new? Well, Marianne, um, hmm, let's see.

Nothing. Well, you're pretty consistent there. Yes, thank you very much.

Maybe I should stop asking. I got plenty of nothing and nothing's plenty for me. Yeah, gee, you know, same old, same old.

It's about the weather and, um, yeah, that's it. And I know there's stuff in the news and I just can't think of any of it right now. Maybe you're just, maybe you're just blocking it all out.

Maybe. Denial. There we are.

There we are. So what's, what's for lunch this week? Well, because we are talking about education this week, our recipe is for Lunch Lady Peanut Butter Bars. You know, I, I, I like bars, especially at happy hour.

Our favorite treat growing up was the peanut butter bars that Lunch Lady served in our elementary school. Forget about a traditional cookie. As kids, we ran towards these peanut butter Lunch Lady cookie bars like a hungry crowd.

You know, we'd bring an extra 50 cents to school so we could buy one of these bars. Peanut butter bars. Whenever we could.

There was no way to get these homemade cookie bars at a grocery store, but it was great that they had them at school. We're sure they would be equally delightful served at your next funeral lunch. Changing gears, the super centenarian we are featuring this week is Virginia McLaurin, who was born into a family of black sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South and took a star turn as a centenarian when she danced with Barack and Michelle Obama at the White House.

Upon entering the room to greet President Obama and the First Lady in 2016 at a Black History Month reception at the White House, she let out a loud, Hi, how are you? Mr. Obama asked. I'm fine, Ms. McLaurin said, her head bobbing with excitement. As Mr. Obama led Ms. McLaurin across the room to his wife, he implored her to take it easy.

Slow down now, he said affectionately. Don't go too quick. In the center of the room, Ms. McLaurin danced with Mrs. Obama for a moment.

Then, with the President on one arm and the First Lady on the other, she paused to consider the setting and her place in American history and told them she was so happy to have a black President and First Lady in the White House. I never thought I would live to get in the White House, she said in a video that captured her visit. Ms. McLaurin was born in South Carolina during the Jim Crow era and grew up walking 10 miles to school in the single pair of shoes she would get each year.

Around 1939, she moved to Washington as one of the millions of black people who moved from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states during the Great Migration. She worked several different jobs and lived a quiet life. At age 106, when the video of her in the White House was shared online, she suddenly had a platform.

She used her newfound fame to encourage Americans to vote. The link to her full obituary is in the show notes. Please go to our webpage for this week's recipe for Lunch Lady Peanut Butter Bars and additional resources for this program.

Everyone Dies is offered at no cost but is not free to produce. Please contribute what you can. Your tax-deductible gift will go directly to supporting our non-profit journalism so that we remain accessible to everyone.

You can also donate at www.everyonedies.org. That's every, the number one dies.org or at our website on Patreon. That's www.patreon.com and search for Everyone Dies. Marianne? Thanks Charlie.

I presented a paper at an actuary conference and took advantage of listening to the other presenters' papers. An actuary is a professional with advanced mathematical skills who deals with the measurement and management of risk and uncertainty. For example, they are the people who determine insurance rates on age and gender and what group is responsible for car accidents.

If you have a teenage boy who drives, you know how expensive their insurance is because of their high risk. Now, one of the papers I listened to was about education and death. Basically, they were talking about how people with higher education die at an older age than those with less education.

In the movie Grease, Frankie Avalon sings, beauty school dropout, go back to high school. That advice could have added years to someone's life. You may think that the death gap related to education is for those with a college degree and those without, and that's true to a certain extent, but the significant gap is between high school dropouts and high school graduates.

Researchers have looked at the data between mortality, which is defined as the number of deaths within a society, and education in a wide variety of ways that I'm not going to go into, but most recently, Novosad and colleagues decided to analyze mortality from 1992 to 2018 among the least educated 10% of Americans. By definition, this group becomes no larger or smaller as a share of the population over time. It's always 10%.

And documented. Now, spoiler alert, that the least educated 10% have faced catastrophic mortality increases. Am I being dramatic when I say catastrophic? You decide.

Among white women ages 50 to 54 years old, high school dropouts had mortality rates of 161% higher in 2016 to 2018 than in 1992 to 1994, suggesting an annualized mortality increase of 4.1% per year. 161%? I think that's phenomenal. Regarding white men, mortality for the least educated 10% increased by 62%, while men in the top 30% of education had mortality declines of at least 43%.

So, lower 10% had an increased mortality of 62%. The top 30% had a decline of 43%. Now, mortality rates among Blacks separated by educational group, but it was less of a difference than among whites.

For Black women ages 50 to 54, mortality rose by 34% to 41% for the bottom 10% of education, but declined among all groups in the top 90%. For Black men in the same age group, mortality change was close to zero in the bottom 10%, but declined by at least 30% in all other groups. Now, there's a graphic in the show notes that illustrates this that, for those of you who like pictures, and I like pictures, it really shows how the lines have changed.

Since World War II, the United States has seen improved health and survival in nearly all demographic groups in all developed countries. But rising mortality among white Americans is a major deviation from this trend and a cause for concern. For the least educated 10%, which roughly means high school dropout, death rates have been rising starkly for white men and women, and rising slightly for Black women, while staying roughly constant for Black men.

As with the poor, the least educated have a range of socioeconomic disadvantages, such as high unemployment, low insurance coverage, poor nutrition, and exposure to harmful environmental factors. Novosad and colleagues' research findings imply that recent middle-age mortality increases among the least educated 10% are worse than those among the poorest 10%. So it's not about money, it's about education.

It's possible that this is because low income can change easier than low education, or because education is a marker of early life disadvantage and reflects low socioeconomic status in the present and the past years. National estimates suggest that each high school dropout costs the United States economy at least $250,000 over the course of his or her lifetime because of greater reliance on welfare and Medicaid, more criminal activity, poorer health, and lower tax contributions. On average, the annual medium income of a high school dropout is $25,000 compared to $46,000 for an individual with a high school or equivalent degree.

A higher proportion of dropouts than high school graduates is unemployed and in prison, and dropouts have poorer health, even controlling for income, and other sociodemographic disparities associated with dropping out. School dropout has not typically been considered as a public health issue, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Public Health Association have advocated that it should be because good health is predicted by good education and health disparities are predicted by educational disparities. Education is a strong predictor of health outcomes, including death, likely in part because less education is highly connected with health risk behaviors such as smoking, being overweight, and being sedentary, sitting around, and in part because more education leads to more income, which can purchase housing in safer neighborhoods, healthier food, better health care, and the like.

Estimates suggesting that promoting education to reduce health disparities could save eight times more lives than could be saved through medical advances in drugs and devices. The average American high school dropout's life expectancy at birth is 14.2 years less for men and 10.3 years less for women than those who graduate high school. During their lives, dropouts are more likely than graduates to experience both chronic and acute health problems.

The American Public Health Association estimates that eliminating dropouts could save more than $17 billion annually in Medicaid and other health care expenditures, as well as additional billions in welfare, criminal justice, and increased tax revenues. Although it may not be possible to eliminate people dropping out of high school, as citizens and parents and grandparents, we need to be aware of the consequences of doing so and using whatever influence we have on at least the people in our lives to try to keep them either in school or to get their high school equivalent. If you know someone who's not finished high school, you can suggest the website finishyourdiploma.org. Finishyourdiploma.org. Encourage kids to stay in school so they don't have to stay on the faster road to death.

Thoughts, Charles? So in the past, let's say 10 years, has the number of dropouts increased? I mean, has there been more and more dropouts lately? No, but what these researchers did is there's lots of ways that you can slice up the pie and look at education. Now, if you look at just dropouts, I don't know if they would be in the lower, all of them would be in the lower 10% or if that would include other people, but for the sake of being able to compare apples to apples, these researchers just looked at the lowest 10% of education, and that's going to include high school dropouts, and it might include some people who've graduated high school and did two college classes. It depends on the population at any point in time that they're looking at, but what they're saying is just always look at the lowest 10% and compare that across years.

So it's not necessarily always going to be about high school dropouts exclusively, but it will primarily include high school dropouts. Now, if those numbers have changed, I don't know. What I have been reading about is people are, especially here in the South, are more and more homeschooling.

And I've had different projects going around the house, so different service people coming in with high school age kids with them, which like, oh, how come you're not in school? And they'd say, oh, I'm homeschooled, but they're helping their mom paint or they're helping their dad do something. And so I'll always talk to the kids about, well, what are you learning? What does homeschooling mean? And one kid was telling me that her mom has like this computer program, and she has to go through and answer the questions, and she has to get a certain score in order to pass that section. So I said, oh, is that a good way to learn? She says, well, I just do it until I pass the section.

So how much is she learning? How much is she learning about even applying? She's definitely not writing any papers or doing any projects or, you know what I mean? It's just all on the computer. And I've been reading that homeschool is more of a thing. Back years ago, the kids that I had in college that were homeschooled were phenomenal when I was living up in New Hampshire because of their critical thinking and just really, really good students when they got to college.

And it makes me wonder, are these kids going to go to college, and what are they going to be able to do? So that's another piece of things that I'm sure will get captured in the future. Yeah, and just that whole thing about, you know, critical thinking, there's, yeah, if you just keep looking at the screen and keep repeating it until you get it right, yeah, what thinking is there in that? And it's just the whole thing just about learning how to be, I don't know, well, just basic things like learning how to socialize. If you're just, you know, at home and just limited to, I mean, for me, it just seemed if you're just at home and you're limited to those four walls, how are you learning to socialize also? Well, this girl was going, her mom was a painter, and the girl would come and help the mom paint, help the mom tape off things, and I thought, huh.

Yeah, okay. All right. Thanks, Marianne.

I mean, it's something to consider. In our third half, Marianne and I have a scene about a parent saying goodbye to her children from Lee Child's book, The Enemy, a Jack Reacher novel. I'm French.

You're American. There's a world of difference. An American gets sick.

She's outraged. How dare that happen to her? She must have the fault corrected immediately, at once. French people understand that first you live and then you die.

It's not an outrage. It's something that's been happening since the dawn of time. It has to happen.

Don't you see? If people didn't die, the world would be an awfully crowded place by now. It's about when you die. Yes, it is.

You die when it's your time. That's too passive. No, it's realistic.

It's about picking your battles. Sure, of course, you cure the little things. If you're in an accident, you get yourself patched up, but some battles can't be won.

Don't think I didn't consider this whole thing very carefully. I read books. I spoke to friends.

The success rates after the symptoms have already shown themselves are very poor. Five-year survival, 10%, 20%. Who needs it? And that's after truly horrible treatments.

Won't you miss us? Wrong question. I'll be dead. I won't be missing anything.

It's you that will be missing me. I miss my father and my mother and my grandparents. It's a part of life, missing the dead.

You're really asking me a different question. You're asking, how can I abandon you? You're asking, aren't I concerned with your affairs anymore? Don't I want to see what happens with your lives? Have I lost interest in you? I understand. Truly, I do.

I ask myself the same questions. It's like walking out of a movie, being made to walk out of a movie that you're really enjoying. That's what worried me about it.

I would never know how it'll turn out. I would never know what happened to you in the end with your lives. I hated that part.

But then I realized, obviously, I'll walk out of the movie sooner or later. I mean, nobody lives forever. I'll never know how it turns out for you.

I'll never know what happens with your lives. Not in the end. Not even under the best of circumstances.

I realized that. Then it didn't seem to matter much. It will always be an arbitrary date.

It will always leave me wanting more. How long? Not long. You don't need me anymore.

You're all grown up. That's life. So let me go.

Let's go out to dinner. We all ordered the same three courses. We ordered a fine red wine.

But he ate nothing and drank nothing. He just watched us. There was pain showing in his face.

Joe and I ate self-consciously. He talked exclusively about the past, but there was no sadness. He relieved good times.

He laughed. He rubbed her thumb across the scar on Joe's forehead and scolded me for putting it there all those years ago, like she always did. I rolled up my sleeve, like I always did, and showed him where he had struck me with a chisel in revenge, and he scolded him equally.

He talked about things we had made in school, talked about birthday parties we had thrown on grim, faraway bases in the heat or the cold. He talked about our mother, about meeting her in Korea, about marrying her in Holland, about her awkward manner. Why didn't you tell us a year ago? You know why.

Because we would have argued. It was a decision that belonged to me. The next day I got breakfast items again in the Rue Saint-Dominique, and we ate them with bowls of coffee the French way, all three of us together.

My dad had dressed in his best and was acting like a fit young man, temporarily inconvenienced by a broken leg. It must have taken a lot of will, but I guess that was how he wanted to be remembered. We poured coffee and passed things to each other politely.

It was a civilized meal, like we used to have long ago, like an old family ritual. Then he revisited another old family ritual. He did something he had done 10,000 times before, all through our lives, since we were first old enough to have individuality of our own.

He struggled up out of his chair and stepped over and put his hands on Jill's shoulders from behind. Then he bent and kissed his cheek. What don't you need to do? He didn't answer.

He never did. Our silence was part of the ritual. You don't need to solve all the world's problems, Jill.

Only some of them. There are enough to go around. He kissed his cheek again.

Then he kept one hand on the back of his chair and reached out with the other and moved himself over behind me. I could hear his ragged breathing. He kissed my cheek.

Then, like he used to all those years before, he put his hands on my shoulders, measured them side to side. He was a small man fascinated by the way his baby had grown. You've got the strength of two normal boys.

What are you going to do with this strength? I didn't answer. I never did. You're going to do the right thing.

Then he bent down and kissed me on the cheek, and I thought, was that the last time? And that's it for this week's episode. Stay tuned for the continuing saga of Everyone Dies, and thank you for listening. This is Charlie Navarrete, and from Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and best-selling author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

And I'm Marianne Matzo, and we'll see you next week. Remember, stay in school, and every day is a gift. This podcast does not provide medical advice.

All discussion on this podcast, such as treatments, dosages, outcomes, charts, patient profiles, advice, messages, and any other discussion are for informational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of your primary care practitioner or other qualified health providers with any questions that you may have regarding your health. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard from this podcast.

If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately. Everyone Dies does not recommend or endorse any specific tests, practitioners, products, procedures, opinions, or other information that may be mentioned in this podcast. Reliance on any information provided in this podcast by persons appearing on this podcast at the invitation of Everyone Dies or by other members is solely at your own risk.