Genetic Advantage and Equality of Opportunity in Education : Two Definitions and an Empirical Illustration

Recent advances in the literature of social-science genetics have found credible genetic based measures that predict educational attainment - the educational attainment Polygenic Scores (PGS’s). And while the Equality of Opportunity (EOp) literature has long acknowledged the existence of ‘talents’, ‘innate ability’ or ‘genetic ability’, existing frameworks are not well equipped to incorporate a direct measure of genetic advantage. In addition, there exists prevalent disagreement within both kinds of literature on whether genetic components should be perceived as a fair or unfair source of advantage. This paper proposes an EOp framework that explicitly includes genetic advantage and that encapsulates two EOp definitions; one where genetic advantage is counted as fair inequality and one where genetic advantage is counted as unfair inequality. The PGS is used as a measure of genetic advantage while correcting for genetic nurture and accounting for its correlation with other circumstances. An illustration using the US Health and Retirement Study finds that the share of inequality of opportunity for years of education is 26% under the view that genetic components are unfair sources of advantage and 21% otherwise. A cohort analysis finds decreasing returns to genetic advantage for high school completion and increasing returns for college completion and overall years of education. The results suggest an increasing role of genetic advantage in attaining higher educational levels, with genetic advantage explaining 3.3% of the variation of college completion for older cohorts (1920-1929) and 6.8% for younger cohorts (1950-1959). These results show that different classifications of genetic advantage within the EOp framework lead to different estimates of the level and trend of EOp. They also call for a more transparent discussion of the true meaning of merit in education