HMN 2026: how genes and education influence socioeconomic success

Ambitious public education policies have the capacity to cushion the role of the “genetic lottery” in people’s life chances. This is one of the main conclusions of a scientific study by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) and Stockholm University (Sweden) analyzing the impact of an educational reform in England. These findings could be applied to the design of future educational policies.

The article, published in the American Journal of Sociology, analyzes the extent to which genes influence educational and financial success, pointing out that this impact depends directly on the educational policies to which children are exposed.

“Specifically, we observed that following an educational reform such as the 1944 one in England, which introduced free compulsory education, the weight of genes on people’s socioeconomic outcomes was reduced by between one-fifth and one-third of a standard deviation,” explains one of the study’s authors, Alicia García Sierra, a researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at UC3M.

The study examines how the Education Act of 1944 in England influenced the relationship between genes and socioeconomic outcomes, such as education, income and wealth. Specifically, this reform abolished tuition fees in secondary education and extended compulsory schooling by raising the minimum school-leaving age by one year.

To identify the causal effect of this reform, the study’s authors used data from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging and applied a regression discontinuity design, a quasi-experimental methodology that allows for the estimation of causal effects.

“The main finding of our study is that the genetic lottery—that is, how much our genes influence our lives—depends on the socioeconomic and educational context in which a person grows up,” concludes UC3M professor Alicia García Sierra, who conducted this research at the University of Lausanne.

According to the study’s data, once the British reform was implemented, genes ceased to be as important in determining people’s education, income and wealth throughout their lives.

The study also shows that those who benefited most from this educational reform were precisely those with a lower genetic predisposition toward education.

“Our intuition is that the reform reduced how much these genes mattered for students’ socioeconomic outcomes because it basically removed a barrier to entry and reduced the level of selection inherent in the educational system,” García Sierra explains.

Family barriers that persist

Another notable revelation of the study is that while the influence of genes decreased after the reform, the association between parents’ socioeconomic status and their children’s socioeconomic outcomes experienced no changes. That is, they found no evidence that this relationship varied before and after the law.

“This suggests that there are elements transmitted through the family that a reform is unable to change,” notes the UC3M researcher. “Factors such as the fact that students from wealthier families are more likely to attend extracurricular activities, go to higher-quality schools or have access to other economic resources constitute advantages of family social class that an isolated educational reform cannot alter,” she said.

The study’s results cannot be directly extrapolated to the current situation, given that free education is much more widespread in almost all Western countries, according to the researchers.

Rather, the relevance of the study lies in allowing reflection on what other types of reforms could be considered today and which elements of the educational system continue to operate as barriers to entry and retention for students.

In this regard, the researchers point out that certain educational reforms focused on system quality (such as those centered on improving curriculum quality or those that continue to guarantee equitable and free access) could potentially achieve a similar effect on the relationship between genes and individuals’ socioeconomic outcomes.

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