Undergraduate Laws
Pre-Course Exercises: Exercise 1
Please read this article and then, without reference to it, see how you do with the questions which follow.
SHOULD LAW DEGREES CARRY GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNINGS?
How long you live might depend upon what subject you study at university, according to new research - the first to look at the association between university courses and mortality.
The study found that law students, together with those studying arts subjects, were the most likely to die young. Those who studied science subjects ‘had substantially lower risks of mortality’ than those in the arts faculty and medics were the least likely to die young, despite having been the heaviest smokers at university.
The research which is published in the August Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine was conducted by Dr. Peter McCarron and his colleagues in Glasgow and Belfast. They followed up health records collected from 8367 males who had studied at Glasgow University between 1948 and 1968, 939 of whom had died before the cut-off date of 30 th June 2000. The research was restricted to males as relatively few females from those cohorts had died.
The researchers’ findings demonstrated, amongst other things, that:-
- Those who had studied arts subjects or law were the most likely to die young
- Divinity students (who had been older than other students) had the lowest blood pressure
- Medical students had been the heaviest smokers, followed by law students: science students having been the least likely to smoke
- Arts students were twice as likely as medical students to die of lung cancer but half as likely to die from accident, suicide or violent means
- Medics were the most likely to suffer alcohol-related deaths.
Surveys demonstrate that people with affluent childhood circumstances have lower mortality than those from more deprived backgrounds and the medical students studied had had the highest proportion of fathers in social classes I and II which might explain their relative longevity. Arts and divinity students had the lowest proportion of fathers in these social classes.
There was evidence that law and science students had a greater risk of death from lung cancer than medical students despite the fact that medical students were the heaviest smokers. The researchers comment that this may be because medics were more likely to give up later on in their careers whereas lawyers may tend to carry on smoking. However, this does not explain lung cancer mortality in science students who, the study found, were the least likely to smoke.
Nevertheless, science students, together with medics (despite the demon drink!) and engineers did, generally, live longer although it was acknowledged that these graduates with enhanced employment prospects were likely to be more affluent with a healthier lifestyle (although this could equally be said of those who had studied law!). Additionally, modern health surveys suggest that today’s medical students may have even better health prospects, since arts and social science students are now the most likely to smoke.
According to the researchers, their findings point to the potential for disease prevention among the large proportion of the population who now have third-level education. But perhaps it is as simple as choosing to study for a medical degree if you want to live longer