WASHINGTON, March 11: If you have been contemplating going back to school to get a degree, this might convince you: a study by the Harvard School of Medicine has shown people with a better education live longer.

“Between the 1980s and 2000, life expectancy increases occurred nearly exclusively among high-education groups,” the study said.

While life expectancy for people with a high school degree or less did not change between 1990 and 2000, the better-educated gained more than 1.5 years over the same period, the study showed.

“A 25-year-old with a high school degree in 1990 could expect to live another 50 years, or for about 75 years,” lead author Ellen Meara told AFP.

“Looking at a similarly educated 25-year-old in 2000, you have the same expected life span,” said Meara, assistant professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School.

“For the better educated, you have an expected life span of 80 years in 1990, but it’s 81.6 by the year 2000. So it’s quite a big gain.” The reasons for such longevity appear to be that more educated people have better access to both information about disease and medical advances.

“Quite literally, why are the better educated living longer? They’re less likely to die of diseases,” said Meara.

“As information about how to live longer, healthier lives becomes available and technologies become available to help you do things like quit smoking or lead a less sedentary lifestyle, we have to some extent figured out successful ways to do this,” Meara said.

“But we’ve only brought it to certain parts of the population.” Life expectancy grew across the board for all races and genders between 1990 and 2000, showed the study, which looked only at non-Hispanic blacks and whites to “limit the impact of immigration on estimates.” But, during that 10-year span, the longevity gap between the well-educated and poorly-educated widened.

A well educated white man lived, on average, 5.8 years longer than a white man with less education in 1990. By 2000, that difference had grown to 7.9 years.

Data for black men, and women of both races, showed similar tendencies, except in the cases of poorly educated black and white women, whose life expectancy went down by 0.9 years and 0.2 years over 10 years, due in large part to lung diseases.

“The 1980s and 1990s were periods of rapidly rising life expectancy, but the mortality declines that yielded these gains did not occur evenly by education group,” the study says.—AFP