Educational Attainment
Years of schooling completed, studied genome-wide in nearly 300,000 people and then 1.1 million. A real, replicated signal exists — and even at its largest scale it explains barely a tenth of the variance in the one thing it was built to predict, in a trait shaped enormously by the society someone grows up in.
What this condition connects to
Educational attainment — years of schooling completed — has been one of the most heavily studied traits in behavioural genetics, not because it is a clean readout of anything innate, but because it is easy to measure precisely in enormous samples. The researchers behind the largest such study say so directly: it is useful "as a proxy phenotype," a stand-in measure that correlates with harder-to-measure things, not a direct window into intelligence or ability.
Two studies, a decade apart, an order of magnitude apart
Okbay et al. 2016 combined a discovery sample of 293,723 people with a replication sample of 111,349 from UK Biobank, finding 74 genome-wide-significant loci for years of schooling completed. The associated positions were disproportionately found in genomic regions that regulate gene expression in the fetal brain — a real, biologically coherent signal, not noise. The paper's own framing of its size is the one to keep: "genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation," stated in the same sentence as the acknowledgment that the trait is strongly shaped by social and environmental factors. 70 of this study's loci are the variants on this page.
Lee et al. 2018 scaled the same question up by nearly a factor of four: 1.1 million people, 1,271 independent genome-wide-significant positions. That is an enormous, thoroughly replicated finding by the standards of human genetics. And the practical yield from all of it: a polygenic score built from the analysis explains 11 to 13% of the variance in educational attainment, and 7 to 10% in a related measure of cognitive performance. More than a thousand genome positions, in over a million people, and the resulting score still leaves the large majority of the variation unexplained.
In the news
2026-04-30 · Londono-Correa D, et al., Nature Communications 2026, PMID:42062297
Cognitive ability is usually studied as one thing. This study split performance on cognitive tests into three parts — reaction time, fluid reasoning (working out something new) and crystallized knowledge (what a person has learned) — and reports a genome-wide analysis of crystallized knowledge in about 439,000 people. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, ADHD and Alzheimer's disease were each genetically correlated with the three parts, and with a non-cognitive factor tied to educational attainment, but the size and even the direction of the correlation depended on which part and which disorder. 10 of the study's positions are already on this site, including rs34316 (MEF2C), filed here under educational attainment, and rs429358 (APOE), which the study reports for fluid reasoning. PMID:42062297.
From our blog
Clinical detail
What this page is, and is deliberately not
This is not a test of intelligence, and no genotype on this page predicts how far any individual person will go in school. Educational attainment is diagnosed by nothing — it is not a medical condition — and it is not something a test, a guideline, or an intervention is built around here.
Three things are worth saying plainly, because this trait is more easily misread than anything else on this site. First, "years of schooling" is a measurement of an outcome, not of ability — it is shaped by family income, school access, regional and national education policy, and culture, none of which a genome-wide association study can separate out from biology. Second, even the largest version of this research — 1.1 million people, 1,271 genome positions — produces a polygenic score explaining only about a tenth of the variance in the trait it was built to predict. Third, the researchers who ran these studies use educational attainment as a "proxy phenotype" specifically because it is easy to measure at this scale, not because it is a clean stand-in for intelligence or any other single underlying thing.
None of that makes the finding fake. It is a real, replicated, biologically coherent signal — genes near the associated positions really do concentrate in fetal brain regulatory regions. What it is not, at any scale reached so far, is a usable prediction about one person.
Which ancestries this evidence comes from
The studies behind these variants recruited participants from different ancestries — a result found in one population doesn't always transfer to another. Based on 1590 of 3567 linked studies with a resolved discovery ancestry.
Sources
Databases, guidelines and references
Quoting this page
Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0: free to read, share and adapt for non-commercial use, naming MyGeneLog™ and linking the exact page. Commercial use, including training or serving a commercial AI system, needs a licence — https://www.mygenelog.com/license
Educational Attainment. MyGeneLog™. https://www.mygenelog.com/conditions/educational-attainment
Questions about Educational Attainment
Do these variants measure intelligence?
No. They are associated with years of schooling completed, which the researchers who study it explicitly describe as a proxy measure, not a direct readout of intelligence. It correlates with cognitive performance but is not the same thing as it.
Can a polygenic score from these variants predict how far a specific child will go in school?
Not usefully. Even the largest study to date (1.1 million people) produces a score explaining only 11-13% of the variance in the trait — the large majority of the difference between any two people remains unexplained by it.
If genetics only explains a small share, why does this page exist?
Because the finding is real and worth stating honestly, including its own limits: a genuine, replicated, biologically coherent signal exists, and it is nowhere near strong enough to use on an individual — which is exactly the distinction a marketed "learning ability" genetic test would blur.
Does this research separate genetics from social advantage?
Not fully, and the original researchers say so themselves: educational attainment is strongly influenced by social and environmental factors. A genome-wide association study finds correlations with genotype; it does not, and cannot by itself, disentangle a family's income or a country's school system from a child's own genetic contribution.
Free to reuse, non-commercially. This page's text is original writing from freely-available research, licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 — share and adapt it with attribution to MyGeneLog™; commercial use is licensed. It's general research-derived information, not medical advice or a diagnosis — see Terms of Use.