ABSTRACT
The two best predictors of children’s educational achievement available from birth are parents’ socioeconomic status (SES) and, recently, children’s inherited DNA differences that can be aggregated in genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS). Here we chart for the first time the developmental interplay between these two predictors of educational achievement at ages 7, 11, 14 and 16 in a sample of almost 5,000 UK school children. We show that the prediction of educational achievement from both GPS and SES increases steadily throughout the school years. Using latent growth curve models, we find that GPS and SES not only predict educational achievement in the first grade but they also account for systematic changes in achievement across the school years. At the end of compulsory education at age 16, GPS and SES respectively predict 14% and 23% of the variance of educational achievement. Analyses of the extremes of GPS and SES highlight their influence and interplay: In children who have high GPS and come from high SES families, 77% go to university, whereas 21% of children with low GPS and from low SES backgrounds attend university. We find that the associations of GPS and SES with educational achievement are primarily additive, suggesting that their joint influence is particularly dramatic for children at the extreme ends of the distribution.
HIGHLIGHTS
- Genome-wide polygenic scores (GPS) and socioeconomic status (SES) account together for 27% of the variance in educational achievement from age 7 through 16 years
- The predictive validity of GPS and SES increases over the course of compulsory schooling
- The association of GPS and SES is primarily additive: their joint long-term influence is particularly pronounced in children at the extreme ends of the distribution
- 77% of children with high GPS from high SES families go to university compared to 21% of children with low GPS from low SES
Footnotes
FUNDING, We gratefully acknowledge the on-going contribution of the participants in the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) and their families. TEDS is supported by a program grant to RP from the UK Medical Research Council (MR/M021475/1 and previously G0901245), with additional support from the US National Institutes of Health (AG046938) and the European Commission (602768; 295366). R.P. is supported by a Medical Research Council Professorship award (G19/2). S.v.S. is supported by a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Fellowship (2017-2019).
OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT, The analyses reported in this manuscript were not pre-registered. The data and materials are available from the permanent TEDS archive upon request to R.P. (robert.plomin{at}kcl.ac.uk).
This version of the manuscript has been revised for writing language and the interpretation of the findings.