Mapping the Link between Life Expectancy and Educational Opportunity

In the United States, the average lifespan of an adolescent varies widely by neighborhood.

In 2015, an average 15-year-old could expect to live to age 79. However, teens living in the 1 percent of neighborhoods with the lowest life expectancies could expect to live to 70—a lifespan nine years shorter.

Educational attainment, a key social determinant of health, is one of the most powerful predictors of life expectancy. This association has strengthened over the past 20 years, placing our nation's schools at the forefront of initiatives to improve teen health outcomes and reduce health disparities.

Measures of educational attainment, however, provide state and local officials with little actionable information to guide their efforts. To effect change, officials need data that both identify the factors that influence educational attainment and illustrate the educational experiences schools provide.

Measuring educational opportunity, or the contexts and resources available to support educational success, may provide more actionable points of intervention. As with adolescent life expectancy, educational opportunity is not distributed equitably. Communities with high concentrations of people living in poverty or people of color have less access to experienced educators and rigorous academic content.

In this interactive tool, we examine the relationship between educational opportunity and life expectancy to provide information that education and health policymakers need to communicate how investments in education may promote teen health.

This project is based upon work supported by the Urban Institute through funds provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We thank them for their support but acknowledge that the findings and conclusions presented in this report are those of the authors alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Urban Institute or the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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We used four domains of educational opportunity, inspired by a 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to capture students' high school experiences. Each high school was assigned an educational opportunity score based on the indicators in these domains: 1) effective teaching, 2) rigorous academics, 3) nonacademic supports, and 4) supportive conditions for learning. Scores were then divided into five evenly sized groups (quintiles) from low to high levels of educational opportunity. We defined educational opportunity for each neighborhood (i.e., census tract) based on the score(s) of the nearest high school(s) in the school district. The figure below shows what educational opportunity looks like in a neighborhood with access to average levels of educational opportunity (i.e., the average school in the middle quintile).