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Education and Self-Rated Health

Cumulative Advantage and Its Rising Importance

University of Texas at Austin, mirowsky{at}prc.utexas.edu

Catherine E. Ross

University of Texas at Austin

The cumulative advantage hypothesis predicts that the adulthood rate of decline in health differs across levels of education in a manner that progressively enlarges the health gap across most or all of adulthood. The rising importance hypothesis predicts that the differences across levels of education in the rate of health's decline have been growing for many decades. If both are correct, then each phenomenon tends to obscure the other when comparing the health gap across age groups in a particular year or period. The trend also can make it seem that health converges across levels of education in old age when it actually diverges. A latent-growth model of U.S. data from 1995, 1998, and 2001 supported both hypotheses. It also showed a trend toward lower age-specific self-rated health at all levels of education, but less so the higher the education. There was no significant convergence over time in older age groups.

Key Words: education • health • age-period cohort • cumulative advantage • latent-growth models

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