ArticlePloS one2015
Equality in Educational Policy and the Heritability of Educational Attainment.
Article in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Interplay of Genes and Environment Across Multiple Studies (IGEMS) Consortium After Fifteen Years.Twin research and human genetics : the official journal of the International Society for Twin Studies · 2026Article
- Changes in heritability and shared environmentality of educational attainment across twentieth-century Norway.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The long reach of childhood income inequality: a multinational twin study of gene-environment interplay on adult depressive symptoms.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Charting the shared genetic architecture of Alzheimer's disease, cognition, and educational attainment, and associations with brain development.Neurobiology of disease · 2024Article
- Intergenerational transmission of health inequalities: towards a life course approach to socioeconomic inequalities in health - a review.Journal of epidemiology and community health · 2024Review
- Influences of genetically predicted and attained education on geographic mobility and their association with mortality.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2023Article
- Delayed tracking and inequality of opportunity: Gene-environment interactions in educational attainment.NPJ science of learning · 2022Article
- Too early to declare a general law of social mobility and heritability for education.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Genetics and Learning: How the Genes Influence Educational Attainment.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Review
- Attained SES as a moderator of adult cognitive performance: Testing gene-environment interaction in various cognitive domains.Developmental psychology · 2018Article
- Genetic influence on social outcomes during and after the Soviet era in Estonia.Nature human behaviour · 2018Article
- Understanding the effects of education through the lens of biology.NPJ science of learning · 2018Review
- Can We Validate the Results of Twin Studies? A Census-Based Study on the Heritability of Educational Achievement.Frontiers in genetics · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Secular variation in the heritability of educational attainment are proposed to be due to the implementation of more egalitarian educational policies leading to increased equality in educational opportunities in the second part of the 20th century. The action of effect is hypothesized to be a decrease of shared environmental (e.g., family socioeconomic status or parents' education) influences on educational attainment, giving more room for genetic differences between individuals to impact on the variation of the trait. However, this hypothesis has not yet found consistent evidence. Support for this effect relies mainly on comparisons between countries adopting different educational systems or between different time periods within a country reflecting changes in general policy. Using a population-based sample of 1271 pairs of adult twins, we analyzed the effect of the introduction of a specific educational policy in Spain in 1970. The shared-environmental variance decreased, leading to an increase in heritability in the post-reform cohort (44 vs. 67%) for males. Unstandardized estimates of genetic variance were of a similar magnitude (.56 vs. .57) between cohorts, while shared environmental variance decreased from .56 to .04. Heritability remained in the same range for women (40 vs. 34%). Our results support the role of educational policy in affecting the relative weight of genetic and environmental factors on educational attainment, such that increasing equality in educational opportunities increases heritability estimates by reducing variation of non-genetic familial origin.
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