Long MAN

The work, which involved DNA from 1.1 million people and researchers drawn from 40 institutions, led to a scoring system that can roughly predict how educated someone is by examining that person’s DNA.

Those with the lowest genetic scores had only a 10 percent chance of having graduated from college. By contrast, those in the highest quintile of genetic promise did so 50 percent of the time.

It is no surprise that how far a person gets in school is partly determined by genes. Studies of identical twins raised apart, for example, show they are strikingly similar. Until recently, however, scientists did not have the tools to locate the genes that influence human behaviors.