Partner's Education and Mortality in Finland: A Study of Married and Cohabiting Unions among Cohorts Born Between 1932 and 1970

The increasing share of women achieving higher education in the second half of the twentieth century in Western countries has led to changes in the educational distribution of couples in the population. The consequences of the educational expansion for health, and especially mortality, have not received enough attention. We use Finnish full population register data and focus on married and cohabiting couples in 1987–2020, born up to 1970, to examine how the partner’s education is associated with individual-level mortality risk. Accelerated failure time models show that the individual and the partner’s educational level significantly relate to individuals' death risk. Overall, the higher the education level of both an individual and their partner, the lower the individual's mortality rate (p<0.05), with men presenting stronger associations than those of women. Additionally, the type of couple to which individuals belong has a distinct association with their mortality. Homogamous highly-educated couples have the highest survival advantage, while low-educated couples have the greatest disadvantage. Heterogamous couples, where one partner is low-educated and another highly educated, are in between. These results are similar for marriage and cohabitation, and across cohorts. The latter finding highlights the importance of both men’s and women’s education for mortality outcomes. While both men and women show these trends, women present much lower differences in mortality than men. These results indicate that there is a clear resource multiplication mechanism influencing the relationship between partners' education and mortality for men, while for women, the mechanisms seem to fall between resource multiplication and substitution. Consequently, low-educated men partnered with low-educated women emerge as the most vulnerable group in terms of mortality risk.