# Genetic associations with education have increased and are patterned by socioeconomic context: Evidence from 3 studies born 1946–1970

## TL;DR

This study shows that genetic factors related to education have become more influential over time and interact with socioeconomic background.

## Contribution

The study reveals how genetic predispositions and socioeconomic context jointly influence educational outcomes across generations.

## Key findings

- Genetic associations with educational attainment increased over time, explaining more variance in later cohorts.
- Cognitive genetic factors showed consistent associations across generations, while non-cognitive traits became more relevant.
- Genetic effects on education were stronger for individuals from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

## Abstract

Measuring change over time in the predictors of education is challenging; traditional survey-based methods vary both between and within generations. Genetic data are constant throughout the lifecourse and comparable across cohorts, providing a proxy for broad individual ability to investigate how the predictors of education have changed across time. This study, using data from three national British birth cohorts with multiple imputation of phenotypic data and nonresponse weights to help recover baseline sample representation, provides unique insights into how the genetic prediction of education has changed over successive cohorts and how genetic predisposition and socioeconomic advantage combine to influence educational outcomes.

Social scientists have long sought to investigate whether the predictors of educational attainment (EA) have changed across time. Here, we provide insights by incorporating genetic predictors of education in three nationally representative British birth cohorts born in 1946, 1958, and 1970. We investigated whether individual characteristics as proxied by polygenic indexes (PGIs) for EA and cognition have become more relevant to educational success over time and whether returns to genetic predisposition were moderated by early life socioeconomic background. We present three findings. First, associations between the EA PGI and attainment increased over time, with increasing incremental variance explained by the EA PGI. Second, associations between the cognition PGI and attainment were broadly consistent across cohorts, and there was no clear change in explained variance. Since the EA PGI captures multiple traits related to educational success, factors other than those related to cognition may have become more relevant over time. Third, we observed strong evidence of interaction: Associations between the EA PGI and EA were disproportionately larger among those from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. The strength and pattern of associations varied when using EA PGIs that were less conservatively filtered for SNPs. Our findings suggest EA is influenced by social and genetic factors both independently and jointly. Genetic liability and social background could be considered as two forms of inherited advantage which synergistically influence education attainment.