On average, graduates of compulsory schools die much earlier. Statistics Austria announced this on Thursday after evaluating the 2022 demographic indicators based on educational qualifications.
“Austria’s population is getting older and older. In 2023, the average life expectancy of women was 84.2 years, while that of men was around five years lower at 79.4 years. In addition to the gender differences, there is also a clear difference in life expectancy according to educational qualifications: 35- “year-old men with a university degree have a life expectancy that is almost seven years longer than men of the same age who had completed at least compulsory school; for 35-year-old women, the education-dependent difference in life expectancy was around four and a half years,” said Tobias Thomas, General Director of Statistics at Statistics Austria .
The gap in life expectancy grew significantly
The gap in life expectancy between people with the lowest and highest levels of schooling has grown even larger in recent years: in 2015, a 35-year-old academic lived 6.3 years longer and a female academic lived 3.4 years longer than people with a lower level of education. In 2022, this difference increased to 6.9 years for men and 4.6 years for women.
The 2022 analysis shows that by age 35, when most people have completed their formal education, men with college degrees can expect to live to an average of 84.0 years, while those with compulsory schooling can expect to live to an average of only 77. 1 years. The life expectancy of 35-year-old women with a compulsory school certificate is 82.8 years, and that of women with a university degree is 87.4 years, as Statistics Austria announced.
Number of children and education correlate
It also showed that the number of children is strongly related to education. Women with a high school diploma or college degree consistently had the lowest total fertility rate between 2015 and 2022. Most babies are born to women without any education beyond compulsory schooling. While compulsory school graduates had an average of 1.61 children in 2022, this number was 1.24 for women with a high school diploma; Female college graduates had the second lowest number of children at 1.34. However, opposite trends can also be seen: compulsory school graduates have had a declining fertility rate since 2015, albeit from a high level of 2.00 children.
For all other educational qualifications, however, fertility increased until 2021, most notably among women with a high school diploma. For 2022, however, a general decline in fertility rates can be seen across all groups, most notably among women with a high school diploma or university degree.
Academics are also older on average when they give birth to their first child: While the average age at birth for women with compulsory schooling was 29.17 years in 2022, female academics were on average 33.83 years old.
