Count schooling in the death-rate ledger too: each extra year of education lowers adult death risk by about 1.9%

Cost

Free. What it costs is the time and effort of the extra years; for tuition, see §23.4 (secondary vocational school tuition and stipends). The hard part is staying in school the whole way without giving up.

What you get

Researchers gathered the earlier studies and combined them (a systematic review and meta-analysis). The search covered January 1980 to May 2023 and ended up with 603 studies, 70 locations in 59 countries, and 10355 observations. Education and adult mortality (deaths from all causes added together) show a dose-response relationship (the more schooling, the lower the risk). For each extra year of education, the risk of death fell by 1.9% on average (95% uncertainty interval 1.8–2.0, the range the true value most likely falls in). For people aged 18 to 49 it fell 2.9% per extra year (2.8–3.0). For people 70 and over it fell 0.8% (0.6–1.0). No difference was seen between men and women. Splitting countries by level of development (the sociodemographic index) also showed no difference.

Notes

Disputed. The authors themselves report publication bias (p<0.0001), meaning studies with attractive results are more likely to get published. Results also differ widely from one study to the next. All the studies included follow people over time; none put people into groups for a trial. Years of schooling are tangled up with family circumstances, region and occupation, and these studies cannot separate how much of the 1.9% comes from schooling itself and how much from “people who can keep studying had better circumstances to begin with.” The causation can also run the other way: children who are ill or have mental health problems are more likely to drop out and more likely to die early, which makes schooling look more powerful than it is. So the evidence strongly supports “more schooling and a longer life go together,” but not “going to school will add 1.9% to your life.” The size of the benefit is rated small: the reader usually faces three or four more years, which at 1.9% a year adds up to less than a tenth, and by this book's cutoffs that counts as small. The beneficiary is yourself.

Evidence grade

A : Specific numbers from meta-analyses, large cohorts or randomized trials; for law and policy, the statute or official text.

Sources

1. IHME-CHAIN Collaborators (2024). Effects of education on adult mortality: a global systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Public Health, 9(3), e155-e165. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(23)00306-7

Translated from the Chinese original. Original book, section 23, tip 2. Content may be out of date and rules differ by place. When you actually deal with an agency, a doctor or a court, follow what local officials, doctors and lawyers tell you. Disclaimer