Educational Inequalities in Life Expectancy and Disabled Life Expectancy in the U.S.: An Intersectional Cohort Analysis

Substantial disparities in longevity and disability exist between race, sex, and educational groups in the US. However, little research to date has taken an intersectional approach to simultaneously consider inequalities at the intersection of race, sex, and education. We also know little about how these intersectional inequalities have changed across successive birth cohorts, a particularly important topic given the changing history of racialised barriers to educational attainment in the US. 

Utilising data from the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) from 1998 to 2020, we estimate 22 years of partial cohort life expectancy (LE) and disability-free/disabled life expectancy (DFLE/DLE) by education, race, and sex. We find substantial variation in the impact of education by race and sex across U.S. birth cohorts, advancing the debate on how early-life education, and structural barriers to educational attainment, can affect population-level health disparities in later life.

Collin Payne is an Associate Professor at the ANU School of Demography. His research focuses on understanding the role of life-course processes in shaping population health, with a focus on understanding health inequalities across contexts, over time, and between generations. He is an ARC DECRA Fellow, an ANU Futures Scheme recipient, an Associate Investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research, and a visiting faculty member at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.