I've written before about the impact of education on racism. There's considerable evidence that many—but not all—systemic effects of racism are really effects of systemically poor education. Black students, on average, graduate from high school reading at about a 9th grade level, and this hamstrings them throughout the rest of their lives.
Here's another example from a recent study:
We all know that COVID-19 mortality is higher in Black communities than in white communities. But this study, which examines 400,000 death certificates and stratifies them by education, presents a different picture. Race continues to have an impact, but once you account for education it turns out that mortality rates are pretty similar among both Black and white people.¹
More generally, the authors conclude that education has a huge impact on COVID-19 mortality rates, as the chart above makes clear. Roughly speaking, high school grads die at a rate 3x higher than college grads, and this is true for every racial group.
This is purely an observational study. It presents the data but doesn't attempt to ascertain why low education levels are so deadly. There are some obvious possibilities—poor access to health care, crowded neighborhoods, inability to work from home, etc.—but concrete answers will have to wait for further research.
¹The study also includes other racial groups. Compared to white people, mortality rates are higher for Native Americans and lower for both Hispanics and Asian Americans.
...the authors conclude that education has a huge impact on COVID-19 mortality rates...
This may be getting all pedantic, but that's true only in the statistical sense, yes? Perhaps that's what "doesn't attempt to ascertain why low education levels are so deadly" means, but if it's merely a statistical association, then no causal connection has yet been found, which means it has NOT been shown that "low education levels are so deadly" at all. Rather, what is shown is that low education levels are associated with high death rates, perhaps because they are also associated with low income (causally or otherwise), which in turn is associated with poor access to medical care, high-risk jobs and living conditions, etc. That is, it's not the education, or even necessarily the income, that is the cause.
And this is not merely academic; it has policy implications. If you want to reduce mortality rates, you want to focus on the most proximate cause, rather than some indirect cause or, worse, some variable that's highly associated but has no causal effect at all.
Too bad the study didn't include factors such as occupation, housing (apartment vs home) etc., some of which might have been easier to obtain than education level. Don't know whether the omission is due to the original data collectors or the study authors.
Also a comparison of the rate of infections vs mortality might tell a lot about quality of medical care obtained.
Well, bbleh is exactly right, which illustrates why the comments section to Kevin's blog is farther along in analyzing this problem than most politicians.
Until we libs start emphasizing class as much as race, we will be missing major policy implications.
According to the Census bureau, around 40% of non-hispanic whites have a bachelors degree or more, compared to 26% of african-americans.
Since educational attainment can correlate to class, a 40/26 difference is fairly wide. As anyone with college age kids knows, regardless of race, college is hardly something that kids decide, or pay for, solely on their own - in other words, its a hallmark of class. Or, to put it even more bluntly, plenty of not that bright white kids go to college because their parents make them go and pay for it.
The parents do that because the parents know its not a level playing field out there.
Then you end up with completely predictable statistics like this. And when I say "completely predictable" I mean completely predictable to all those parents who force their kids to get the maximum education whether they want to or not.
I gotta agree.
People with less education are more likely to have jobs that won't give them the space to social distance. They aren't working from home.
So I don't see this as anything of a novel correlation.
I think it's pretty obvious -- basically what Kevin deduces: level of education correlates strongly with socio-economic status, which correlates with various cormorbidities when it comes to Covid, mostly due to lack of decent health insurance and access to healthier food sources, excercise, etc. Studies are also finding that poorer people also experience a lot of stress in their daily lives just trying to survive, which weakens the immune system.
Older persons are at much higher risk of death from Covid-19: college attendance and graduation rates have been increasing over time; some of the correlation here is likely explained by older persons being less likely to have attended college.
I think the biggest weakness of this study is that it does not account for age differences among the racial/ethnic groups and among the educational groups. The age-effect on Covid-19 mortality risk is enormous; it is the 900 pound gorilla of risk factors. (I do not fault the investigators for leaving this out: it wasn't in the data they used, they themselves acknowledge this limitation, and I know of no alternative data source that would have provided it. I do fault the public health data gathering response for not gathering and making available more fine-grained information about the epidemic.)
It seems to me that age would have two different effects on their analyses. On the one hand, NH Whites tend to be older, so lack of age adjustment will lead to underestimation of the racial/ethnic effect. On the other hand, the least educated also tend to be older, so lack of age adjustment tends to overestimate the educational effect.
oh, oof, good catch. they lumped in everyone 18+. That's a big issue. honestly anything below 70+ is fairly suspect.
Given how Covid seems to correlate with inflammation, this is suggestive that the known chronic stress associated with lower income leaves these folk more vulnerable.
Completing college is not easy. 50% of Asians, 40% of whites, 25% of blacks and 20% of hispanics have done it (according to the study). For the most effected group (older Americans), the percentages are likely even lower. If you slice off the smartest/most disciplined section of the population, they are going to be shown to exhibit good decision making and also have the ability financially to implement good decisions.
At some level, saying that everyone should make good decisions isn't all that earth shattering. At some point, you have to deal with the fact that some people are going to be less good decision makers than others.