Results indicate that respondents living in a context where there is high proportion of college educated adults, have, on average, higher college expectations. Genetic predisposition has no main effect, but it is mediated by contextual factors. In other words, children who have high genetic predisposition for education do not modify their college expectation if they live in a poor context. This result suggests that college aspiration may be an important factor though which contextual characteristics affect future educational attainment.
The preliminary analysis in this paper show that there is a clear gene-environment interaction effect in shaping educational attainment and that contextual characteristics play a major role in defining educational attainment. Living in a poor deprived neighborhood suppress individual genetic predisposition to higher education. In other words, neighborhood deprivation prevents talented kids to go to college and eventually to climb the social ladder. To our knowledge, this is the first study identifying gene-environment interactions with neighborhood deprivation in educational studies.