Deaths of Despair as Related to the Value of a College Education (regular, border)

[Mike from back east]

All this talk of isolation is one of the keys that has a bearing on the topic of Deaths of Despair as they compare to education levels.

A recent article in the WaPo highlights the area of Martinsburg, WV where some recovering addicts were driven back to their addictions by losing access to their support groups. The lockdowns became a death trap as recovering addicts died by overdoses.


Excerpts: "Rachel Lambert was alone when she learned how Jimmy Horton died, and the news came ... over a screen. ... her old high school friend had been claimed by a more familiar epidemic: He had overdosed. ... Drug deaths are not rare in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, and Lambert knew the risk as well as anyone. She was 34, but had attended so many friends’ funerals that she sometimes felt much older. ... It would be months before she understood more about what lay behind her friend’s relapse ... Human connection lies at the heart of addiction treatment. ... mutual support and accountability have long been a vital part of achieving and maintaining sobriety. ... When America shut down ... those systems disintegrated. Treatment centers closed, and recovery meetings went virtual. Former drug and alcohol users who had long been warned that isolation was a precursor to relapse were suddenly instructed not to leave their homes. ... Addiction makes you want to be alone. A large part of recovery is establishing a face-to-face connection — in person, ... There were 106 fatal drug overdoses last year in Berkeley County, WV, compared to 69 covid-19 deaths,"

Face to face, in-person, peer support, moral support: It takes a village.

Lambert runs a support group there and knew many of the persons who overdosed. The area is a distant bedroom community of the DC area, accessible by rail as well as highway. It's generally a blue collar community with a lot of people without a college education. About 20% of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher and some of those are certainly some of the DC workforce that commutes (i.e., not native to Martinsburg). Compare that to the 62% of adults in Rockville, MD with a bachelor's degree or higher, a DC suburb where the train from Martinsburg passes through on the way to DC.

For Montgomery County, MD, for Jan-Sep 2020, there were 78 opioid deaths (an annual rate of 104 deaths) in a county of 1M people.
For Berkeley County, WV, for all of 2020, there were 106 overdose deaths in a county of 120K people (1/8 the size).
Statistics for both areas are a bit problematic as they're calculated by different states who breakdown the numbers differently.

My contention is the lack of education in the WV county is a key factor in a death rate that's 6-8 times higher; the lower educated ones just lack the skills, knowledge, perseverance and overall mental outlook to forge a successful life experience. The same situation is found in many areas populated by lesser educated persons, and other parts of WV are ever far worse.

[Mike from back east]

Been a year, but new info has arrived that has a relation to this topic so let's update.

New data on life expectancy has arrived in the NY Times and the news is not good. Life expectancy in the USA has dropped by THREE years since 2019, due to COVID, opioids, firearms, obesity, diabetes, and alcohol.
Excerpt: "The average life expectancy of Americans fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years and a stark reminder of the toll exacted on the nation by the continuing coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, the average American could expect to live until the age of 76, federal health researchers reported on Wednesday. The figure represents a loss of almost three years since 2019, when Americans could expect to live, on average, nearly 79 years. ... Although the U.S. health care system is among the best in the world, Americans suffer from what experts have called “the U.S. health disadvantage,” an amalgam of influences that erode well-being, Dr. Woolf said. These include a fragmented, profit-driven health care system; poor diet and a lack of physical activity; and pervasive risk factors such as smoking, widespread access to guns, poverty and pollution. The problems are compounded for marginalized groups by racism and segregation, he added."



A recent chart at this webpage shows life expectancy by state.
Wikipedia shows a list of states and their educational levels.

Top ten states for most people with a B.A. degree are: MA, CO, NJ, MD, CT, VA, VT, NY, NH, and MN.
Top ten states for longest life expectancy are: HI, CA, MN, NY, CT, NJ, CO, WA, MA, and VT.

Bottom ten states for least people with a B.A. degree are: WV, MS, AR, LA, KY, NV, OK, AL, IN, and NM.
Bottom ten states for shortest life expectancy are: MS, WV, AL, KY, AR, OK, LA, TN, SC, and OH. Nine of these ten states have the highest rates of obesity (thus diabetes) which reflects on the poor educational levels in these states and thus lower income levels. Poverty kills; poverty of education, poverty of income, poverty of coping skills, poverty of hope.

Anyone see a trend there?
- Highest educated states have the highest life expectancy.
- Least educated states have the least life expectancy.

Deaths of despair linked to opioids, firearms, obesity, diabetes, and alcohol were elevated by COVID and anti-vax thinking.

Tying it to the gist of this thread, deaths of despair rise as education levels fall. To cut funding for education is to cut our own throats.

[Avondalist]

We are almost at the point where a majority of workers have college degrees. Among the young college attendance rates (although not completion rates) in certain states are above 50%.

This is the worst situation, because it means the majority exercises privilege. When privilege is exercised by the majority, it's basically impossible to effect change. You have to rely on compassion and sympathy from the majority a la the civil rights movement.

Instead we get the usual bromides that "you should have attended college". Looking down on the non-college educated is an acceptable prejudice.

Why not ask whether college is necessary for many jobs? It isn't, and many have asked this. Might as well whistle into the wind.

College has become the world's most expensive aptitude test (which employers don't have to pay for) as well as a means to give an edge to the middling children of families with means. It is a corrupt system and an entrencher of status and injustice.

We would be better off encouraging fewer people to attend college, so that high school degrees become normalized again and students aren't saddled with debt for an education that does not improve their prospects in many cases.

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by Avondalist

We are almost at the point where a majority of workers have college degrees. Among the young college attendance rates (although not completion rates) in certain states are above 50%.

This is the worst situation, because it means the majority exercises privilege. When privilege is exercised by the majority, it's basically impossible to effect change. You have to rely on compassion and sympathy from the majority a la the civil rights movement.

Instead we get the usual bromides that "you should have attended college". Looking down on the non-college educated is an acceptable prejudice.

Why not ask whether college is necessary for many jobs? It isn't, and many have asked this. Might as well whistle into the wind.

College has become the world's most expensive aptitude test (which employers don't have to pay for) as well as a means to give an edge to the middling children of families with means. It is a corrupt system and an entrencher of status and injustice.

We would be better off encouraging fewer people to attend college, so that high school degrees become normalized again and students aren't saddled with debt for an education that does not improve their prospects in many cases.

Having grown up a poor boy in a smokestack America family I agree that the legacy children of alumnus should not get favored treatment or sweetheart pricing on tuitions. If they can't earn their way into college on their SAT scores then don't let them in the best colleges, all the legacy child does is take a seat that a more deserving student should get. Legacies water down the quality of the professionalism we dearly need and which we shout about when we screech "American Exceptionalism." If we measure American Exceptionalism by approvals at the patent office, then, ooooops, tons of foreign names on those patent approvals. Seems we're importing a lot of American Exceptionalism at the higher levels too given that receiving a patent approval is a prima facie incidence of exceptionalism of some sort. Not too many legacy children getting patents. Here's a listing recent patentees, click on the letter A and look at the foreign names getting USA patents.

As far as "not everyone needs college" we've had a similar discussion earlier in this thread and most seem to agree there's a need for trade schools for our non-college, blue collar trades now that unions have been destroyed along with their apprenticeship programs that once trained people for those trades. But with so few trade schools out there, parents are left to prod their kids to go to college, or join the military.

Without apprenticeship programs we have to rely on trade schools and junior colleges for such training but those sources are in short supply. One thing I don't like is importing trade skills from south of the border, but go to any residential development of any size and most of the trades work is done by immigrants (landscaping, carpentry, roofing, drywall, plumbing, electrical, painting, tile, carpets, concrete).

The old bromide about "lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps" is a dirty joke on the vast majority of regular people with a high school diploma or less. We've got to provide the educational opportunities at the local levels and that's going to take some funding.

[OTownDays]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

Article in today's WaPo about how people with no college degree are being left behind as the nation starts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. These people are not members of a skilled trade like the construction trades, many of whom have stayed busy during the pandemic even without a college degree.

Some stats from the article.

"Nearly 4 million adult workers without college degrees have not found work again after losing their jobs in the pandemic. Only 199,000 adult workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in the same situation." (I'm sure a lot of these unemployed people are found in the homeless populations around the country.)

"In March ... the overall economy added back 916,000 jobs. Only 7,000 went to workers with high school diplomas but no college degree."

"Horrigan’s research has shown that both minority females without college degrees and white males without college degrees are having the hardest time finding work again."

"But there’s an eerie similarity to what’s happening at this point ... with high-school educated workers struggling and what happened in the years after the Great Recession when men without college degrees had some of the hardest time finding work again. Many men after the Great Recession ended up so discouraged that they turned to alcohol, drugs and suicide, what became known as “deaths of despair.”

<...snip...>

There's a series of articles in the WaPo about how the rate of rural people "on disability" is double the rate for people in urban areas. Many of these are the no-college types with no skill sets usually found in urban employment centers. Here's a link to one of those article from which I pull this stat: "...disability recipients ... are disproportionately prevalent in rural America — where, on average, 9.1% of the working-age population receives disability, compared to the national average of 6.5% and an urban rate of 4.9" ... are even more overrepresented in the Southeast and central Appalachia. These are places economists have called “disability belts.” There are "families out there with multiple generations on disability.

There's a lot to unpack here.

I have my own perceptions. I think that, due to historical norms, there is now a generation of blue collar folks with just a high school education who believe, whole-heartedly, that society or The System or someone, "owes" them a living, just because they see it as though they have behaved themselves, done their obligatory mandatory education (K-12) and now society owes them a job and a living.

I'm not saying that I agree with that point of view at all; and my perceptions could be skewed. But this is the attitude that I seem to be seeing from relatives, old school chums, former neighbours, etc., that I grew up with. They've done what's required, therefore society owes them a job. Any suggestion that they need to be the captains of their own destiny, and take things into their own hands, and seek some type of extra job training or go back to school, well, that's an affront, that's offensive, the mandatory education oughtta be enough... expecting them to go back for more training is embarrassing to them, for some reason.

A family member made the observation recently that since the pandemic, all the low wage jobs seem to be filled by youngsters in their 20s, and that they've noticed more mid-life blue collars dropping out of the workforce.

To be fair, it's very tough for a blue collar worker to stay employed past mid-life, where physical work is required (and it typically is required; even job ads for admin assistants to tend to require an ability to lift 20lb boxes of printer paper or whatnot).

I have a cousin who was making a good living as a chambermaid at hotels when she was young, married a warehouse worker who had a good salary for a 20-something, and they were DINKS in their 20s. She's been out of work on disability for 15 years now with some type of severe arthritis, so no physical work for her, and no desire or aptitude to get retrained for office work. I suppose she has no cultural or class preparation for that type of work so she is too insecure to try?

In any case, her meds cost $thousands per month, and she is relying on the medical insurance of her partner, who will lose his med insurance when he retires (retirement is imminent). Blue collars with nothing more than high school diplomas are up the creek in some cases nowadays, unless they can retrain.

My father was a hospital orderly who was always preoccupied with the correct way to lift weight, how to do it without wrenching out his back, because if he'd been unable to work, our family would've been on welfare. That is not an easy hole to dig out of once inter-generational poverty sets in, but that's another topic for another day.

[OTownDays]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

As far as "not everyone needs college" we've had a similar discussion earlier in this thread and most seem to agree there's a need for trade schools for our non-college, blue collar trades now that unions have been destroyed along with their apprenticeship programs that once trained people for those trades. But with so few trade schools out there, parents are left to prod their kids to go to college, or join the military.

Without apprenticeship programs we have to rely on trade schools and junior colleges for such training but those sources are in short supply. One thing I don't like is importing trade skills from south of the border, but go to any residential development of any size and most of the trades work is done by immigrants (landscaping, carpentry, roofing, drywall, plumbing, electrical, painting, tile, carpets, concrete).

The old bromide about "lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps" is a dirty joke on the vast majority of regular people with a high school diploma or less. We've got to provide the educational opportunities at the local levels and that's going to take some funding.

Agree with all of this. And I will add: there is a dire need for polytechnic post-secondary schools, to combine theory with applied tech, and to provide the expertise that businesses are crying out for.. this is a solid way for anyone with an "applied" hands-on tendency to find a career with longterm opportunities.

Germany has a ton of polytechnic schools. Canada has gradually been rebranding some colleges as polytechnics and has expanded the options over the past couple of decades. The U.S. already has a few high profile ones (Rensselaer, MIT might fit, etc.)

[Mike from back east]

Originally Posted by OTownDays

Agree with all of this. And I will add: there is a dire need for polytechnic post-secondary schools, to combine theory with applied tech, and to provide the expertise that businesses are crying out for.. this is a solid way for anyone with an "applied" hands-on tendency to find a career with longterm opportunities.

Germany has a ton of polytechnic schools. Canada has gradually been rebranding some colleges as polytechnics and has expanded the options over the past couple of decades. The U.S. already has a few high profile ones (Rensselaer, MIT might fit, etc.)

Spot on! What I'd like to see in the junior college or trade school model is the marriage of both the trade skills along with classes on how to run your own small business, get licensed and insured, keep the books, pay the taxes, the legalities of hiring and having employees, etc. A lot of skilled trades work is perfect for small family-owned businesses; we don't need to call Amazon for a clogged drain.

If people have their own small business they know they have control over their own life and destiny, a solid self-confidence, and thus won't feel the despair that leads to the behaviors which kills so many.

[markg91359]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

Having grown up a poor boy in a smokestack America family I agree that the legacy children of alumnus should not get favored treatment or sweetheart pricing on tuitions. If they can't earn their way into college on their SAT scores then don't let them in the best colleges, all the legacy child does is take a seat that a more deserving student should get. Legacies water down the quality of the professionalism we dearly need and which we shout about when we screech "American Exceptionalism." If we measure American Exceptionalism by approvals at the patent office, then, ooooops, tons of foreign names on those patent approvals. Seems we're importing a lot of American Exceptionalism at the higher levels too given that receiving a patent approval is a prima facie incidence of exceptionalism of some sort. Not too many legacy children getting patents. Here's a listing recent patentees, click on the letter A and look at the foreign names getting USA patents.

As far as "not everyone needs college" we've had a similar discussion earlier in this thread and most seem to agree there's a need for trade schools for our non-college, blue collar trades now that unions have been destroyed along with their apprenticeship programs that once trained people for those trades. But with so few trade schools out there, parents are left to prod their kids to go to college, or join the military.

Without apprenticeship programs we have to rely on trade schools and junior colleges for such training but those sources are in short supply. One thing I don't like is importing trade skills from south of the border, but go to any residential development of any size and most of the trades work is done by immigrants (landscaping, carpentry, roofing, drywall, plumbing, electrical, painting, tile, carpets, concrete).

The old bromide about "lifting yourself up by your own bootstraps" is a dirty joke on the vast majority of regular people with a high school diploma or less. We've got to provide the educational opportunities at the local levels and that's going to take some funding.

I agree in theory with what you are saying. However, in practice I'm not impressed with the tools that are used to determine college eligibility. The SAT has little predictive ability in determining college grades. High school GPA's are probably more predictive, but the quality of a high school education can vary dramatically in different places in this country.

Oftentimes, the best universities and colleges admit very small classes out of huge pools of applicants. Is a student with an SAT in the 99th percentile really a better college prospect than one in the 95th percentile? Is a student with a 3.6 GPA really better than one who took AP classes, but ended up with a 3.4 GPA?

Legacy admissions are troubling, but is it your business to tell a private school who they can and cannot admit to their school? Legacy admissions help raise money for the school. The parents of those students are often heavy contributors to the university. How should it make up the shortfall in donations if they end legacy admissions? Finally, what if there is some truth to the idea that legacy admissions do better in college than non-legacy admissions because the parents of these students know the "ins and outs" of college and that knowledge makes is easier for their children to succeed in an institution? Perhaps, such parents pass on a "work ethic" to their children that other parents do not have.

Personally, I wish classes at prestigious colleges were larger and it was easier for good quality students to get in. I don't think that legacy admissions generally represent poor or non-achieving students getting a free ride. I think often they good quality students who simply are not 4.0 students. Being a 3.7 GPA student does not mean one is unqualified or "did not work hard enough". It simply means that this is an ultra competitive world where large numbers of people are blocked from attending the best institutions on the basis of sketchy data.

[ohio_peasant]

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

... If we measure American Exceptionalism by approvals at the patent office, then, ooooops, tons of foreign names on those patent approvals. Seems we're importing a lot of American Exceptionalism at the higher levels too given that receiving a patent approval is a prima facie incidence of exceptionalism of some sort.

At the highest levels of STEM achievement in America – be it patents granted, scholarly papers, scientific conference presentations, senior technical jobs held, professorships, PhD degrees and so on – the statistics overwhelmingly tilt towards the foreign-born, be they immigrants or foreign students who came to the US to study, or foreigners associated with American-related firms.

In that sense, America is more of a global community, a coffee-house to the world, than a traditional nation. The "exceptionalism" is that a bright villager in Paraguay, Poland or Bangladesh would dream of coming to college here in America, going on to grad school and becoming an engineer… here, and not in Germany or Italy or England, and certainly not in say China. American society is perhaps uniquely suited to provided such a service at-scale.

It’s of course a shame that our poorer and less advantaged citizens are falling behind. But such shame shouldn’t be a cause for abridging or devaluing the worldly-exceptionalism that makes America so attractive for STEM excellence worldwide.

Originally Posted by Mike from back east

As far as "not everyone needs college" we've had a similar discussion earlier in this thread and most seem to agree there's a need for trade schools for our non-college, ....

There is indeed such a need, but the traditional academic college is more of extension and elaboration of general education, than a preparatory-academy for what might be termed a white-collar trade. The essence of formal tertiary education is to produce, well, an educated person... witty, well-read, clever, learned in the best sense of the Western Enlightenment. Such a person would presumably go on to live a physically and mentally more healthy life, to exercise and "eat right", and to thus enjoy statistically better health and longevity outcomes.

Reading the annual alumni-magazine or the engineering society magazine, there's a section for obituaries. These overwhelmingly favor the more successful alumni, who've become sufficiently notable as to be mentioned in such publications. The amazing thing is that today, in 2022, so many of the recently-deceased mentioned in these obituaries had graduation-dates of 1952 or 1957 or something like that. The names are listed by year. There is a huge bulge in the 1950s, declining into the 1960s and flattening out. This means that most of these worthy fellows (and indeed, nearly all are men) were 85-90 years old, at time of death. Maybe even older.

Can we imagine reading an obituary for folks who concluded their formal education with high school? In the listing of 2022 obituaries, at what age would have been the demographic bulge, for this cohort?

[Mike from back east]

Ohio, thanks for a great posting.

the statistics overwhelmingly tilt towards the foreign-born, be they immigrants or foreign students

Yes, and that troubles me a bit because I don't know why we Americans are so overwhelmingly not represented in the exceptional achievement of being granted a patent (not to mention that half my doctors are foreign).

America is more of a global community, a coffee-house to the world,

The melting pot is alive and well, but not as well-loved by our rank and file as it seemed in my childhood when coming to America was a point of pride for most of us. Now, half the country would not object to stopping all immigration.

...a shame that our poorer and less advantaged citizens are falling behind. But such shame shouldn’t be a cause for abridging or devaluing the worldly-exceptionalism that makes America so attractive for STEM excellence worldwide.

I won't devalue our exceptionalism but in the case of patents it's obvious that most of that exceptionalism isn't home grown, it's imported, and again it's worrisome that we don't seem to be growing the talent it takes to make our own future happen. The poorer and less advantaged are the crux of my thread, these people are the very victims of the deep despair that causes them to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. Here are recent stats on life expectancy to consider:

Life expectancy rises with educational attainment.
Top 10 states for people with a B.A. degree: MA, CO, NJ, MD, CT, VA, VT, NY, NH, and MN.
Top ten states for longest life expectancy are: HI, CA, MN, NY, CT, NJ, CO, WA, MA, and VT.
Lots of overlap (7), higher education = longer life expectancy.

Life expectancy falls when educational attainment falls.
Bottom ten states for fewest people with a B.A. degree are: WV, MS, AR, LA, KY, NV, OK, AL, IN, and NM.
Bottom ten states for shortest life expectancy are: MS, WV, AL, KY, AR, OK, LA, TN, SC, and OH
Lots of overlap (7), lower education = shorter life expectancy. Nine of these ten states have the highest rates of obesity and diabetes which reflects on low educational levels and lower income levels. Poverty kills; be it poverty of education, poverty of income, poverty of coping skills, poverty of hope. These various poverties are the gateway drug to despair.

The GOP keeps cutting education funding. To cut education is to cut our own throats, but that seems okay with the GOP.

COVID exacerbated the deaths of despair in our nation, deaths by opioids, firearms, obesity, diabetes, and alcohol were elevated by COVID and anti-vax thinking. I don't have stats yet to quote, but I'm sure that these deaths were concentrated among our poorer, less educated and less advantaged citizens.

There is indeed such a need, but the traditional academic college is more of extension and elaboration of general education, than a preparatory-academy for what might be termed a white-collar trade. The essence of formal tertiary education is to produce, well, an educated person... witty, well-read, clever, learned in the best sense of the Western Enlightenment. Such a person would presumably go on to live a physically and mentally more healthy life, to exercise and "eat right", and to thus enjoy statistically better health and longevity outcomes.

Agree to some extent, but for all those STEM students going to college is a lot more than an extension and elaboration of general education. I see the K-12 experience as enabling the average person to read, write and function in society with enough social mobility to leave home and find their calling wherever it exists. The college education enables people for levels of work that the average high school grad can't access: teachers, librarians, counselors, nurses, managers, administrators, psychologists, pharmacists, all those STEM and medical careers, and many more.

Reading the annual alumni-magazine or the engineering society magazine, there's a section for obituaries. These overwhelmingly favor the more successful alumni, who've become sufficiently notable as to be mentioned in such publications. The amazing thing is that today, in 2022, so many of the recently-deceased mentioned in these obituaries had graduation-dates of 1952 or 1957 or something like that. The names are listed by year. There is a huge bulge in the 1950s, declining into the 1960s and flattening out. This means that most of these worthy fellows (and indeed, nearly all are men) were 85-90 years old, at time of death. Maybe even older.

Many men who graduated college in the 1950s were surely the WW-2 generation; going to college on the G.I. Bill and really worked at it. Having lived through the soul-searing Great Depression those guys were highly motivated to avoid returning to poverty, plus they saw the horrors of war and the poverty of the backwards nations where they served and fought.


Sources:
Education levels from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...nal_attainment

Life expectancy levels from World Population Review: https://worldpopulationreview.com/st...2074.6%20years.

More on life expectancy can be found in a recent NY Times article.