Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health

Abstract

Genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have been linked with a range of positive life course development outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether school environments may moderate these genetic associations. We analyze data from two biosocial surveys that contain both genetic data and follow students from secondary school through mid- to late life. We test if the magnitudes of the associations with educational and occupational attainments varied across the secondary schools that participants attended or with characteristics of those schools. Although we find little evidence that genetic associations with educational and occupational attainment varied across schools or with school characteristics, genetic associations with any postsecondary education and college completion were moderated by school-level socioeconomic status. Along similar lines, we observe substantial between-school variation in the average level of educational attainment students achieved for a fixed genotype. These findings emphasize the importance of social context in the interpretation of genetic associations. Specifically, our results suggest that though existing measures of individual genetic endowment have a linear relationship with years of schooling that is relatively consistent across school environments, school context is crucial in connecting an individual’s genotype to his or her likelihood of crossing meaningful educational thresholds.

Can education be personalised using pupils’ genetic data?

“…The usefulness of polygenic scores for educational research has been previously demonstrated for example in assessing the effectiveness of teachers and schools 12,23 ; selection differences between schools 28,29 ; and social mobility over time and space 30 . However, our results demonstrate that while polygenic scores are useful for investigating group differences, they do not provide suitable value for routine use by teachers and schools above phenotypic data to predict a pupil's attainment.…”

Genetic Nature or Genetic Nurture? Quantifying Bias in Analyses Using Polygenic Scores

“…Even in the absence of confounding due to population stratification, the observation that existing PGSs likely have genetic nurture components complicates their use and interpretation. Say, for instance, a researcher wonders whether there exists moderation of the association between an individual's PGS and their educational attainment as a function of school-level socioeconomic status (Trejo et al 2018). Because a piece of the PGS captures the benefits of having a parent with higher educational attainment and (in turn a higher socioeconomic status), even if a geneenvironment interaction is statistically detected, it is unclear how to interpret it.…”

“…PGSs offer great promise to social scientists interested in incorporating genes into biosocial models of human behavior (Belsky and Israel 2014). In the short term, PGSs may be used as control variables in studies of environmental effects (Rietveld et al 2013), used in gene-environment interaction studies to probe whether genetic effects are environmentally contingent (Trejo et al 2018;Barcellos, Carvalho, and Turley 2018), and used to better understand how genetic factors influence developmental processes (Belsky et al 2016;Belsky et al 2013). In the long run, PGSs might be used to identify those who would benefit most from early medical or educational interventions (say, for a developmental disorder like dyslexia (Martschenko, Trejo, and Domingue 2019)).…”

Genetic effects on educational attainment in Hungary

“…Second, neither the pedigree-based or SNP heritability of educational attainment nor the external validity of polygenic scores is a biological constant. There is evidence that betweencountry differences (Lee et al, 2018) and within-country changes in education policy (Heath et al, 1985) as well as the attendance of different types of schools (Trejo et al, 2018) may affect the heritability of educational attainment (gene-environment interaction). In other words, the relative importance of genetic and environmental effects on individual differences in educational attainment is affected by the characteristics of the environment.…”