Sociological research has traditionally emphasized the importance of post-birth factors (i.e., social, economic, and cultural capital) in the intergenerational transmission of educational advantages, to the neglect of potentially consequential pre-birth endowments (e.g., heritable traits) that are passed from parent to child. In this study, we leverage an experiment of nurture—children who were adopted at birth into nonrelative families—in an effort to simultaneously model the effects associated with both pathways. To do so, we fit a series of simple linear regression models that relate the academic achievement of adopted children to the educational attainments of their adoptive and biological parents, using U.S. data from a recent nationwide sample of birth and adoptive families (the Early Growth and Development Study). Because our dataset includes both “genetic” and “environmental” relatives, but not “genetic-and-environmental” relatives, the separate contributions of each pathway can be identified, as well as possible interactions between the two. Our results show that children’s early achievements are influenced not only by the attainments of their adoptive parents, but also the attainments of their birth parents—suggesting the presence of environmental and genetically mediated effects. Supplementary analyses provide little evidence of effect moderation, using both distal and proximate measures of the childhood environment to model gene-by-environment interactions. These findings are robust to a variety of parameterizations, withstand a series of auxiliary checks, and remain intact even after controlling for intrauterine exposures and other measurable variables that could compromise our design. The implications of our results for theory and research in the stratification literature, and for those interested in educational mobility, are discussed.

传统上，社会学研究强调出生后因素（即社会，经济和文化资本）在教育优势的代际传递中的重要性，而忽略了可能产生的随之而来的出生前end赋（例如遗传性状）从父母到孩子。在这项研究中，我们利用了一项培养实验（出生时被收养为非亲属家庭的孩子），旨在同时模拟与这两种途径相关的影响。为此，我们使用一系列近期的全国出生和收养家庭样本（“早期成长”和“发展研究）。因为我们的数据集包括“遗传”和“环境”的亲戚，而不是“genetic-和-环境亲戚，可以确定每种途径的单独贡献以及两者之间可能的相互作用。我们的结果表明，孩子的早期成就不仅受到养父母的成就的影响，还受到其亲生父母的成就的影响，这表明存在环境和基因介导的作用。补充分析几乎没有证据表明效应减弱，使用儿童期环境的远端和近端测量来模拟基因-环境相互作用。这些发现对于各种参数设置都是可靠的，可以经受一系列辅助检查，即使在控制了可能损害我们设计的宫内暴露和其他可测量变量之后，这些结果仍然完整无缺。讨论了我们的结果对于分层文献中的理论和研究以及对教育流动性感兴趣的人的意义。