Educational Differences in U.S. Adult Mortality: A Cohort Perspective

Early in the twentieth century, scientists and doctors made tremendous achievements to improve health and reduce early death in the United States. Across the latter half of the century, steady gains in longevity were made by reducing mortality risk of degenerative diseases for middle and older adult age groups (Crimmins 1981; Cutler et al. 2010; Yang 2008). Research largely attributes more recent mortality declines to temporal changes in a handful of specific causes of death, chiefly heart disease, lung cancer, and other cancers (Cooper et al. 2000; Guyer et al. 2000; Jemal et al. 2005). These achievements are to be celebrated, but our understanding of factors behind mortality reductions remains limited. One problem is that many studies of U.S. mortality employ a period perspective to understand and analyze trends. In these cases, age-specific mortality risk at one time period is compared to age-specific mortality risk in