It is well-established that both genetics and environments influence educational attainment (Branigan et al., 2013; Lee et al., 2018). We examined whether parental educational attainment polygenic scores were associated with offspring educational attainment. Building on the literature, our findings indicate that not only individuals’ own genotypes, but also parents’ genotypes play a role in influencing individuals’ educational attainment, providing evidence of genetic nurture. This finding is consistent with recent studies demonstrating that parents’ genotypes, both transmitted and non-transmitted to offspring, influence offspring educational attainment (Bates et al., 2018; Belsky et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018). By incorporating parental genotypes and child genotypes in our analyses of offspring educational attainment, our findings add to the growing literature of the importance of both direct genetic effects and social genetic effects. The fact that parental education polygenic score predicted offspring educational attainment over and above the effect of offspring education polygenic score suggests that parental education polygenic score shape the family/social environments that influence offspring educational attainment independently of direct genetic transmission between parents and offspring.
