Here’s the abstract of a paper that will be given at a scientific conference in Oslo this summer:

GWAS stands for Genome-wide association study.

Abstract Genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals for educational attainment (Rietveld et al., 2013). The results of the latest GWAS for educational attainment identified 74 genome-wide significant loci for educational attainment (Okbay et al., 2016). Here, in one of the largest GWAS to date, we increase our sample to nearly 750,000 individuals, and we identify over 600 genome-wide significant loci associated with the number of years of schooling completed. Note that at the time of presentation, we will likely have updated our meta-analysis to include over 1,000,000 individuals

A million person sample size. Wow. I heard about the scale of this project last year and I’m still in awe.

They use educational attainment (years of schooling completed) as their dependent variable because that’s one trait that is asked about in major medical studies that collect genetic data.