High School Reunion Survival Rate

Factual Questions
1

I recently attended my 20 year high school reunion. One of the reunion commitee members had created a poster to memorialize class members who had passed away. There were six people in the display other people at the reunion had indicated an additional three class members who had died. The class size was about 400 students, as I recall. Some people though 9/400 is high, I think it is a little low. My question:

For the typical american high school graduating class, how many deaths would be typical (per 100 students) by the 10, 20, 30, 40…year reunions?

2

The actual figure for deceased members of your class is probably even higher, as I am sure not everyone is accounted for. Some of the missing in action could also be dead.

3

http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/allcause.html gives you a table of death rates broken down by age. Looking at the tables I get about 350 to 400 deaths per 100,000 in ages between 18 and 38 per year. so that is about 7000 to 8000 deaths per 100,000 over 20 years. From which I get about 28 people out of 400 should have died. These are back of the envelope calculations which assume that the death rate is unchanged from graduation to the 20th reunion which is wrong and probably over estimates the expected number of deaths.

So I agree with you 9 seems pretty low.

4

Of course, the results for an individual school can sometimes vary from the average by a great degree.

Monkeypants
Class of '83
High School for Coal Mining Studies, Stuntman Pursuits, and Remedial Electrical Engineering

5

Gazpacho, you can’t just add up the number in the age ranges to get 350 to 400.

I would guess from that chart that for the teen years to 30s, the average rate would be about the 126 per 100,000 per year mark that they have for the 24-35 age group. So, that’s 1 and a quarter per 10,000. Times twenty years that’s 25 people per 10,000.

Thus, I’d say that 9 per 400 is very high. I mean that’s 2 or 3 percent of your class (assuming some deaths are missing). Maybe some of them died together? Auto-crash?

6

See also this data from a similar link:
http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/

From 1-4 the death rate per 100,000 people is 38.3
From 5- 14 the death rate per 100,000 people is 22
From 15- 24 the death rate per 100,000 people is 90.3
From 25- 44 the death rate per 100,000 people is 177.8
From 45- 64 the death rate per 100,000 people is 708
For people over 65 the death rate per 100,000 people is 5,071.40