A new study done by an international team of scientists has identified about 13,000 genetic variants that can be associated with a person’s educational attainment. The research was published recently in the journal Nature Genetics.
The study is one of the most wide scale researches done so far. The research analyzed the genetic information of more than 1 million people having European ancestries- almost three times the size of a previous similar study done in the year 2016.
The research team reports that these genetic variants do not influence a person’s educational attainment too much- only somewhat around 4 percent. Daniel Benjamin, the corresponding author of the study and associate professor for the Center for Economic and Social Research at USC Dornsife said, “Even variants with the largest effects predict, on average, only about three more weeks of schooling in those who have those variants compared to those who don’t.”
“Yet, when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors”, he added.
The data for the study was provided by the UK Biobank Resource, 23andMe- a personal genomics company, and combined information that was collected from other 69, small scale genetic studies. It is no secret that demographic factors like household incomes and maternal education do play an important role in a person’s education attainment, but they recently found that ‘polygenic scores’- which are scores that signify the predictive power of all one million genetic variants, including the ones that can associated with educational attainment — have the same predictive power as demographic factors.
Environmental and social factors also affect a person’s educational attainment, but genes that can be linked with cognitive functions like memory, and conscientiousness, also influence to a person’s education. “We found that many of the genes associated with educational attainment are influential in virtually all stages of brain development and in neural communication within the brain,” explained Peter Visscher, professor at the University of Queensland and a senior author of the study.
The research team’s finding also supported the fact that educational attainment is not influenced by the gender of the person- they found that genetic variants on the X chromosome in both men and women are present in nearly the same amount.