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Advanced Education and Mortality Compression in the United States 145
Matthews, & Brayne, 2007; Melzer, Izmirlian, Leveille, & Guralnik,
2001; Zimmer & House, 2003). In sum, it has been shown that a
persistent positive and robust relationship exists between education
and a variety of health measures and longevity, and that this
relationship exists across age groups, cohorts and time periods
(Cutler & Lleras-Muney, 2006; Lynch, 2003; Masters, Hummer, &
Powers, 2012; Mirowsky & Ross, 2003). As education has been
viewed as a “fundamental cause” of mortality disparities (Link &
Phelan, 1995; Phelan & Link, 2005), having more education could
possibly allow individuals to acquire more health-related resources
and thereby extend their lives and delay the onset of morbidity,
resulting in mortality compression. Brown et al. (2012) use two
nationally representative data sets to display the significance of
education for mortality compression in the United States.
Most mortality compression research investigates trends over
time (Cheung & Robine, 2007; Cheung et al., 2008; Ouellette &
Bourbeau, 2011) due to the common assumption that
socioenvironmental and technological improvements associated
with socioeconomic development are reflected as differences in
longevity and compression over time (Brown et al., 2012). However,
studies have shown that improved longevity can be accompanied by
constant compression at the population level (Ouellette & Bourbeau,
2011) while socioeconomic differences in longevity within a
population are accompanied by differences in old-age mortality
compression (Brown et al., 2012).
Brown et al. (2012) found the significance of education on
mortality compression in the United States by adopting the best-
fitting form identified by Montez, Hummer, and Hayward (2012)
to distinguish older Americans’ educational attainment into the
categories of 0-11 years, 12 years, and 13+ years. These educational
categories correspond roughly to less than a high school education
(0-11 years), high school graduation (12 years), and some college
education and above (13+ years) (Brown et al., 2012; Chiu,
Hayward, & Saito, 2016). Montez et al. (2012) examined different
forms from a review of the relationship between education-mortality