Put "whether schooling is useful" into the mortality account as well: each extra year of education cuts adult death risk by about 1.9%

Each extra year of school cuts the average risk of dying in adulthood by about 1.9%. It is clearest for people aged 18 to 49, about 2.9% lower per extra year; above 70 it is only 0.8% lower. People who keep studying often already had better circumstances, so how much is schooling itself cannot be pulled apart.

Cost

No money. What you spend is the time and energy of those extra years of school; for tuition see item 4 of this section (vocational-school tuition and grants). The hard part is staying with it and not quitting halfway.

Benefit

Prior studies were gathered and pooled (systematic review and meta-analysis). The search ran from January 1980 to May 2023; 603 studies were included in the end, from 70 sites in 59 countries, with 10355 observations. Education and adult mortality (deaths from all causes combined) follow a dose-response relation (more schooling, larger drop). Each extra year of education cuts death risk by 1.9% on average (95% uncertainty interval 1.8–2.0; the true value falls roughly in that band). For people aged 18 to 49 the drop is 2.9% per extra year (2.8–3.0). For people over 70 the drop is 0.8% (0.6–1.0). No difference by sex was seen. Split by national development level (sociodemographic index), no difference was seen either

Notes

Contested. The authors themselves reported publication bias (p<0.0001), meaning studies with nicer-looking results are more likely to be published. Results also differ widely across studies. All included work is follow-up observation, not trials that assign people to groups. Years of schooling are tangled with family circumstances, region, and occupation. Of this 1.9%, how much comes from schooling itself and how much from "people who can keep studying already had better circumstances" cannot be separated in this kind of study. Reverse causation cannot be separated either. People who were already ill or had mental problems as children are more likely to drop out and more likely to die early. That makes schooling look more useful than it is. So it strongly shows that "more schooling and living longer go the same way," but it does not equal "if you go to school you gain 1.9% more life." Benefit magnitude is set to small: what readers usually face is three or four more years; at 1.9% a year that adds up to under one tenth, which under this book's thresholds counts only as small. The beneficiary is you

Sources · 1

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. doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(23)00306-7