| News people who write up academic audience usually display their ignorance. Those who specialize in these articles should take some research methodology classes, but usually these are grad classes, so maybe that doesn't make sense. News people report the news a mile wide and an inch deep. Some of them know politics better than the average person, but many of them do not know science well enough to report it well.I remember The Economist's online article about the death of Oral Roberts presented it as a contradiction that Oral Roberts believed that he was going to heaven, and also that he thought that he just might rule in Tulsa in the afterlife. Apparently, their religion correspondence was unfamiliar with dispensational eschatology, the millennium, etc. The idea that education adds years to your life assumes correlation is the same as causation. Education may correlate with higher income, better diet choices, access to fitness facilities (e.g. fitness centers on university campuses for university faculty members) or other variables that have a causal relationship with longer life spans. Maybe manual labor and exposure to the elements or hazardous chemicals reduces lifespans and education correlates with less of the negative variables. It seems unlikely that education itself is what causes longer life |