College graduation may be partly determined by your genes (quotes Ben Domingue)

But researchers find that nurture is stronger and can override nature

Social scientists are curious to see if the human genome project might help answer an age-old question about education: is intelligence, or academic performance, written in our genes?

Two years ago, researchers took a first crack at this. Through data mining the genomes for 100,000 individuals, they were able to isolate clusters of genetic patterns that seemed to be associated with higher levels of education. They didn’t identify education or intelligence genes, specifically, but they found that people who had completed more years of schooling were more likely to share certain genetic variations with each other than with those who had dropped out of school earlier.

But these same genetic patterns were also more commonly found in people who lived in wealthier neighborhoods and were raised by well-educated mothers. Maybe it was good schools and good parenting driving the educational attainment, and not genes at all?

Ben Domingue of Stanford University and a team of researchers figured out a clever way to clear away these confounding factors: study pairs of siblings. Because so much is similar for siblings  (same mothers, same neighborhoods), small differences in their genetic makeup could stand out. And, in an August 2015 paper published in AERA Open, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Educational Research Association, the researchers found that within families, an adolescent with a higher “polygenic score” than her or his sibling tended to go on to complete slightly more schooling. (A polygenic score is a measure of how many of the genetic variations associated with educational attainment a person has in his or her genome.)

“We do have evidence to suggest that genes are causing differences in educational attainment, but it’s a very small,” Domingue said, explaining that the sibling with a significantly higher polygenic score continued in school for only one-third of a year longer, on average, than the sibling who had a lower score.

Socio-economic factors remain much stronger. For example, having a mother who graduated from college was associated with an additional 1.7 years of schooling.

Read the entire article on the Hechinger Report website.