This isn’t to say that staying in school is “in the genes.” Each genetic variant has a tiny effect on its own, and even together, they don’t control people’s fates. The team showed this by creating a “polygenic score”—a tool that accounts for variants across a person’s entire genome to predict how much formal education they’re likely to receive. It does a lousy job of predicting the outcome for any specific individual, but it can explain 11 percent of the population-wide variation in years of schooling.

That’s terrible when compared with, say, weather forecasts, which can correctly predict about 95 percent of the variation in day-to-day temperatures. But when it comes to predicting education, it’s comparable to classic factors such as household income or how educated your parents are. “Within social science, that’s basically unheard of,” says Benjamin, who works at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. “We can explain education as well with saliva samples as with demographics.”

“Education needs to start taking these developments very seriously,” says Kathryn Asbury from the University of York, who studies education and genetics. “Any factor that can explain 11 percent of the variance in children's performance in school is very significant and needs to be carefully explored and understood.”

“If we can identify genetic risks for low cognitive ability, there is an argument for putting extra provisions in place to mitigate against that disadvantage,” Asbury adds. “We already do that for environmental disadvantages, such as through additional funding or free school meals. I think we need to seriously consider the implications of biological risk factors and how a fair society should respond to them.”

On the flip side, there are fears that this kind of research could lead to discrimination against, or stigmatization of, people with certain genetic variants. Such fears aren’t unreasonable: Many forefathers of genetics were also proponents of eugenics, advocating that people with supposedly inferior genes should be discouraged from reproducing.

Paige Harden, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that neither these dystopian perils nor the more beneficent applications around personalized education are realistic. “I don’t think that’s where we are,” she says, because one still cannot use a person’s DNA to accurately predict their scholastic fates.

Benjamin and his colleagues agree. Look at the graph below, which plots years of schooling against subjects’ polygenic scores. Each dot is a person. Sure, on average, those with higher scores got more education than those with the lowest. But for any given score, there are huge variations in years of schooling. “Should we use the score to put some people into more advanced classes and others into more remedial classes?” says Benjamin. “That’s a total nonstarter because of the low predictive power for any given individual.” The same applies to mathematical prowess, or overall cognitive ability.

(Social Science Genetic Association Consortium)

And that’s only for 1.1 million people of European ancestry. The score’s predictive power is even lower for people of different ancestries, who likely have their own sets of education-associated variants.