College education is a fault line in American society. Men who didn’t graduate from college have not had real gains in wages since the 1960s, and white Americans without a college degree are increasingly dying “deaths of despair” — liver disease from alcoholism, overdoses from opioids, suicides. Now new research has found that college graduation, with all its advantages, is partly the outcome of a genetic lottery.

On Monday, scientists published a study in Nature Genetics that analyzed the genes of 1.1 million people of European ancestry, including over 300,000 23andMe customers. Over 99 percent of our DNA is identical in all humans, but researchers focused on the remaining 1 percent and found thousands of DNA variants that are correlated with educational attainment. This information can be combined into a single number, called a polygenic score. In Americans with European ancestry, just over 10 percent of people with a low polygenic score completed college, compared with 55 percent of people with a high polygenic score. This genetic disparity in college completion is as big as the disparity between rich and poor students in America.

Because researchers focused on differences within an ancestrally homogeneous group of people, their results have no implications for understanding racial disparities in education. Also, when researchers looked at African-Americans, the genetic variants only minimally predicted educational outcomes. Many more studies will need to be done before we can come close to understanding fully the role of genetics in the American education system.

But research like this makes many people nervous. Linking social inequality to DNA — isn’t this eugenics? After all, the term “eugenics” was coined by Francis Galton, whose 1869 book, “Hereditary Genius,” argued that British class structure was based on a biological inheritance of “eminence.” In the United States, the idea that inferior genes were to blame for poverty led to state-sponsored atrocities, including forced sterilization and institutionalization.