In this paper I estimate the relationship between school quality and mortality. Although many
studies have linked the quantity of education to health outcomes, the effect of school quality on
health has yet to be examined. I construct synthetic birth cohorts and relate the quality of
education they attained to their mortality rates. I find that there is a statistically significant
relationship between the mortality-schooling gradients, which depict the return to a year of
schooling, and the length of school term and relative teacher wage. For instance, increasing the
relative teacher wage by one standard deviation results in about 1.9 less deaths per 1,000 people
per extra year of education. My results suggest that one way to improve the health of the
population is to improve school quality.