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.