The research, led by Eirik Haugland Kvalvik and colleagues including Yunpeng Wang, Kristine Beate Walhovd, Torkild Hovde Lyngstad, and Ole Røgeberg, drew on two extraordinary Norwegian data resources: the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study, known as MoBa, with 120,527 participants, and the Norwegian Twin Registry, contributing 8,910 individuals. Norway is an ideal setting for this kind of analysis because its education system is standardized and its registries are unusually complete. Rather than collapsing educational histories into a single number, the team treated each credential as its own event: finishing high school, earning a bachelor’s degree, completing a master’s, and reaching a doctorate. That reframing allowed them to ask a question the standard design cannot answer—do the genetic associations with education stay constant as people climb the ladder, or do they change from rung to rung?

The technical machinery behind the study combined three complementary approaches. First, the researchers ran genome-wide association studies, or GWAS, which scan hundreds of thousands of genetic variants for statistical links to each milestone. Second, they built polygenic indices, abbreviated PGIs, which condense the tiny effects of many variants into a single score for each individual and can be tested for how well they discriminate between people who do and do not reach a given milestone. Third, they applied twin models, which compare identical and fraternal twins to estimate heritability from family resemblance rather than measured DNA variants. Running all three on the same cohorts let the investigators cross-check their conclusions in ways no single method allows.

The headline finding is a striking inverse-U pattern. When the team analyzed each transition separately—conditioning on having reached the previous milestone—the heritability attributable to measured common genetic variants, known as SNP heritability, and the predictive power of the polygenic indices both rose and then fell across the educational sequence. The peak came at the transition from high-school completion to attaining at least a bachelor’s degree, where SNP heritability reached roughly 0.14 and the polygenic index achieved a Tjur R-squared of about 0.05, a measure of discrimination for binary outcomes. Beyond that point, at the postgraduate transitions, both measures declined. In other words, the genetic signal is strongest in the middle of the educational distribution and weakest at its very top.

That decline at the doctoral transition comes with an important statistical caveat that the authors are careful to flag. Estimates for the master’s-to-PhD transition were computed only among individuals who had already attained at least a master’s degree, a highly selected group. This creates range restriction: when nearly everyone in the analyzed sample shares the preceding credential, the variation available for genetic associations to explain is compressed, and attenuation of the estimates may partly reflect that selection rather than a genuine weakening of genetic influence. The study does not claim that genes stop mattering at the doctoral level; it claims that the standard interpretation of per-year effects cannot tell you what is happening there at all.

A second set of analyses probed how the genetics of education relate to the genetics of intelligence, a question that has long shadowed the field. The researchers computed genetic correlations between their milestone-specific results and large-scale GWAS of educational attainment and of intelligence. The pattern was clear: genetic overlap was high at earlier transitions but dropped at later ones. With the widely used EA4 educational attainment GWAS, the genetic correlation was approximately 0.92 at the transition from high school to a bachelor’s degree, but only about 0.38 at the transition from master’s to doctoral attainment. Sensitivity analyses using an alternative intelligence GWAS and additional polygenic indices reproduced the same transition-specific trajectories, suggesting the pattern is not an artifact of one particular reference panel or scoring method.

The twin data added a third perspective, and one of the study’s most surprising results. In cumulative analyses of attained status across the full cohort, the gap between twin-based heritability estimates and SNP-based estimates—the so-called missing heritability—shrank as the milestones became more advanced. At high-school completion, the point-estimate gap was roughly 0.38; at the doctoral level, it narrowed to about 0.11. This convergence challenges a common intuition that rare, hard-to-detect genetic variants must account for the missing heritability in complex traits. It suggests instead that part of the discrepancy in education research may arise from how the phenotype itself is constructed, with years-of-schooling scales blending together biological and social processes that behave differently at different points in the sequence.

Genetic correlations between the milestones themselves told a complementary story. Adjacent milestones—say, high-school completion and a bachelor’s degree—showed very high genetic overlap, around 0.92, indicating that largely the same set of variants is associated with both. But distant milestones were less genetically aligned: the correlation between high-school completion and a doctorate was approximately 0.71. The genetic architecture of education, in other words, is not a single unified target. Different stages of the educational career share much of their biology with their immediate neighbors while drifting apart from stages further away, a structure that a single years-based phenotype is mathematically incapable of expressing.

Why does this matter beyond the statistics? Years-of-education GWAS convert distinct credentials and progression steps into one numerical scale, and the resulting estimates are routinely reported as effects per additional year of schooling. The study’s central warning is that such estimates should not be read as though one year carries the same meaning across the entire educational sequence. A year that ends with a high-school diploma, a year in the middle of an undergraduate program, and a year of doctoral research are not interchangeable units of exposure; they sit at different points of a selective, staged process with different social and biological correlates. Polygenic indices built on the years-based phenotype inherit that ambiguity, which may explain why their predictive performance varies so sharply across the milestones examined here.

The practical implications reach into several active debates. For researchers using educational attainment as a proxy in studies of health, fertility, social mobility, or cognitive aging, milestone-preserving analyses offer a way to check whether conclusions depend on how the phenotype was coded. For geneticists, the results suggest that future GWAS of education could gain resolution by modeling transitions explicitly rather than pooling them. And for anyone interpreting polygenic scores in social science, the study is a reminder that a score’s predictive power is not a fixed property but a function of where on the educational ladder the question is being asked. By making the hidden structure of the years-based measure visible, the Norwegian team has sharpened the interpretation of education GWAS and polygenic indices alike—and shown that sometimes the most informative move in genetics is not to gather more data, but to look more carefully at the phenotype already in hand.

Subject of Research: Genetic associations with discrete educational milestones in Norwegian cohorts

Article Title: Beyond years of schooling: Genetic associations across educational milestones in two Norwegian cohorts

Article References: Kvalvik, E. H., Wang, Y., Walhovd, K. B., Lyngstad, T. H., & Røgeberg, O. (2026). Beyond years of schooling: Genetic associations across educational milestones in two Norwegian cohorts. PLOS Genetics, 22(9), e1012310. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1012310

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1012310

Keywords: educational attainment, genetics, GWAS, polygenic indices, twin studies, heritability, Norway, MoBa, intelligence, doctoral attainment, SNP heritability, genetic correlation

The study is grounded in a long intellectual tradition. Sociologists from Ibn Khaldun to Montesquieu speculated about the relationship between climate and social organization, and modern researchers have built an increasingly rigorous evidence base on the topic. Econometric studies have shown that extreme weather events reduce schooling and educational attainment in settings as varied as Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the global tropics. Research published in Nature Human Behaviour found that heat exposure inhibits learning both internationally and within the United States, with each additional hot school day measurably reducing achievement. Laboratory work in ergonomics has demonstrated that both hot and cold temperature exposure degrade human performance, while building science has documented how classroom air quality and thermal comfort affect students’ subjective perception, physiological responses, and learning outcomes. What has been missing, the Turkish authors contend, is a fine-grained sociological account of how these forces play out inside actual schools, in the words of the people who inhabit them every day.

To fill that gap, Gürbüz and Sever designed a qualitative study using a phenomenological approach, a method that seeks to capture the essence of lived experience rather than to measure variables statistically. They deliberately chose two contrasting provinces. Ağrı, in eastern Turkey, is defined by a cold, continental climate with long, harsh winters in which temperatures routinely plunge far below freezing. Siirt, in the country’s southeast, endures a hot climate in which late spring and summer bring punishing heat. The comparison allowed the researchers to ask whether the same underlying mechanism, the interaction between climate and educational practice, manifests differently under opposite thermal regimes.

The research group comprised 82 participants: 27 students, 27 teachers, and 28 school administrators drawn from schools across both provinces. Participants were selected through maximum diversity sampling, an intentional strategy designed to capture as wide a range of perspectives and circumstances as possible rather than to produce a statistically representative sample. Data collection and analysis followed established interpretative phenomenological procedures, and the study received ethics approval from Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The findings were then organized around three intersecting contexts that the authors identified as the main channels through which climate reaches the classroom: the sociocultural, the economic, and the educational.

The sociocultural channel proved to be among the most striking. In Ağrı, the long winter season reshapes the rhythm of social and family life, and with it the rhythm of schooling. Snow, ice, and extreme cold affect student attendance, complicate journeys to and from school, and restrict outdoor activity during breaks, a problem that connects to broader research showing that season and weather strongly influence physical activity levels. In Siirt, the equivalent disruption arrives with the heat. As air temperatures climb in late spring and summer, the study found that negative effects on educational practices intensified, echoing earlier work in Şanlıurfa, another hot Turkish province, which documented how climate characteristics affect the learning and teaching performance of secondary school students and teachers. In both cases, the climate does not merely make people uncomfortable; it restructures the social conditions under which education takes place.

The economic channel operates through family livelihoods and school resources. Seasonal agricultural labor, a well-documented feature of rural Turkey, pulls children out of school during certain periods of the year, and the timing of that labor is itself dictated by climate. Weather-dependent work patterns shape when families can afford to prioritize schooling and when economic necessity wins. At the institutional level, schools in both provinces were found to be vulnerable to climate impacts and, in the authors’ assessment, weak in terms of climate interaction, meaning that school buildings and routines had not been designed with regional climatic conditions in mind. This vulnerability was most severe in schools constructed without consideration of local climate, where problems multiplied.

The educational channel is the most direct. The study found that hot and cold weather conditions had a more negative impact on educational practices than cloudy, windy, or rainy conditions did. Extreme temperatures interfere with concentration, lesson pacing, the scheduling of the school year, and the physical usability of classrooms and schoolyards. In Ağrı, educational practices were more negatively affected overall, because the extended winter season prolongs exposure to disruptive cold. In Siirt, the damage was concentrated in the hottest months, when overheated classrooms undermine the very conditions learning requires. These findings align closely with the international quantitative literature: a meta-analytic review of temperature and performance found that both heat and cold degrade task performance, and studies of school buildings in cold climates, from Russia to China, have emphasized the importance of thermal design for educational quality.

What makes the study distinctive is its insistence that climate is not simply a background variable but an active participant in the social institution of education. The authors frame their work within ecological models of human development, in which children’s growth is understood as nested within overlapping environmental systems, from the family to the school to the broader culture and physical environment. Seen through this lens, a snowed-in road or an unventilated classroom is not an inconvenience at the margins of education; it is part of the ecological structure that determines what schooling can actually deliver. The research also resonates with historical evidence: an analysis of school logbooks from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed that extreme weather repeatedly disrupted schooling and exposed social vulnerabilities that persist in different forms today.

The policy implications are straightforward but consequential. The authors recommend that regional climatic conditions be taken into account when establishing educational programs and institutions, in order to safeguard the quality of education. In practice, that means school calendars that reflect local seasonal realities, building codes and architectural standards suited to cold or hot climates, investment in heating, insulation, and ventilation where they are most needed, and curricula and scheduling decisions that anticipate the disruptions that weather reliably brings. As climate change intensifies heat extremes and weather volatility across the globe, the study suggests that educational planners can no longer treat climate as a fixed given. The classrooms of the future, the research implies, will succeed or fail in part on how well societies learn to design education around the atmosphere that surrounds them.

Subject of Research: The interaction between regional climate conditions and educational practices in schools

Article Title: A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate

Article References: Gürbüz, M., & Sever, M. (2026). A sociological research regarding the interaction between educational practices and climate. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01745-6

Keywords: climate, education, sociology of education, qualitative research, phenomenology, school buildings, heat exposure, cold climate, Turkey, student attendance, educational attainment, school policy

The research team, led by Geoffrey Mariga Mariita of Great Lakes University of Kisumu together with colleagues from the USAID DUMISHA Afya Project, interviewed 300 adult patients aged 18 years and older who were enrolled in antiretroviral therapy care at Level 4 and Level 5 public health facilities in Busia County. Rather than relying on convenience sampling, the investigators used probability-proportional-to-size sampling combined with systematic random selection, a design that gives larger facilities a proportionally greater chance of contributing participants and reduces the risk that a single clinic’s idiosyncrasies dominate the results. Structured interviews were conducted in Kiswahili and covered five domains: socio-demographic characteristics, cultural factors, psychosocial factors, health-service factors, and socio-economic factors.

A methodological strength of the study lies in its definition of the primary outcome. Adherence status was not self-reported, which is notoriously prone to social desirability bias, but instead derived from Electronic Medical Record pharmacy pick-up records. A patient was classified as non-adherent if a scheduled medication pick-up was missed by more than 28 days within the preceding six months. Viral load results and pill counts were abstracted as secondary corroborating indicators, allowing the researchers to triangulate their classification against clinical and behavioral measures. This objective anchor matters, because much of the adherence literature in sub-Saharan Africa rests on patient recall, which can overestimate adherence substantially.

The headline result is, on its face, encouraging. Of the 300 participants, 272, or 90.7 percent, were classified as adherent, while only 28, or 9.3 percent, fell into the non-adherent category. The cohort was 60 percent female and 40 percent male, a distribution consistent with the demographics of HIV care in much of eastern Africa. A non-adherence rate below ten percent, measured against a strict pharmacy-based definition, suggests that the treatment system in Busia County is reaching most patients effectively, even in a border region characterized by population movement, cross-border trade, and the logistical complications that mobility brings to chronic disease care.

Yet the study’s central analytical contribution lies in identifying which of the many candidate factors actually predicted non-adherence. The researchers first assessed bivariate associations using chi-square tests, then built a multivariable logistic regression model to estimate independent predictors, and finally cross-checked those estimates against a mixed-effects model that accounted for clustering of patients within facilities. This dual-model strategy is important: patients at the same hospital share providers, drug stock levels, and local norms, and ignoring that clustering can produce misleadingly narrow confidence intervals. Only two variables survived both modeling approaches.

The first was sex. Female participants had significantly lower odds of non-adherence than male participants, with a logistic regression odds ratio of 0.48 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.23 to 1.00, at a p-value of 0.049. The facility-clustered mixed-effects model confirmed the association, reporting a coefficient of negative 0.091 with a p-value of 0.035. In practical terms, men in this cohort were roughly twice as likely as women to miss a scheduled pharmacy pick-up by more than a month. This pattern echoes a broader and increasingly recognized phenomenon in global HIV care: men across sub-Saharan Africa are less likely to test for HIV, initiate treatment later, and disengage from care more often than women, partly because clinic services and outreach programs have historically been designed around antenatal and maternal health touchpoints that women encounter routinely.

The second independent predictor was educational attainment. Higher education was associated with lower odds of non-adherence, with an odds ratio of 0.56, a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.35 to 0.89, and a p-value of 0.015. The mixed-effects model again corroborated the finding, with a coefficient of 0.064 and a p-value of 0.012. The mechanism is plausibly multifaceted: education correlates with health literacy, the ability to navigate appointment systems, comprehension of dosing instructions, and economic stability, all of which can smooth the practical friction of lifelong daily medication. Whatever the precise pathway, the result implies that adherence support materials and counseling delivered at a single literacy level may leave the least-educated patients behind.

Equally notable is the list of factors that did not independently predict adherence. Marital status, social support, cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, stigma, patients’ ratings of health services, and difficulty balancing antiretroviral drugs with a prescribed diet all failed to reach statistical significance in either model. This null result is a caution against over-reading smaller studies: the authors themselves note that the most plausible explanation is limited statistical power, since only 28 patients were non-adherent, leaving a small subgroup in which even moderately sized effects are hard to detect. In other words, the absence of significance for stigma or social support should not be interpreted as evidence that these factors are irrelevant, but rather that this dataset cannot resolve their contribution. The finding nonetheless challenges the assumption, common in program design, that psychosocial and cultural variables are always the dominant drivers of adherence in rural African settings.

The context of Busia County sharpens the significance of these results. Kenya has made substantial national progress toward the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets, which call for 95 percent of people living with HIV to know their status, 95 percent of those diagnosed to be on sustained treatment, and 95 percent of those on treatment to achieve viral suppression. National aggregates, however, can conceal pockets of vulnerability, and border counties with high population mobility are precisely the places where local evidence has been thinnest. By grounding adherence measurement in pharmacy records across multiple public facilities, including Busia County Referral Hospital, Khunyangu Sub-County Hospital, Port Victoria Hospital, and Teso North Sub-County Hospital, the study provides the kind of locally actionable data that national dashboards cannot supply.

The authors’ recommendations follow directly from their two robust findings. They call for sex-responsive adherence support, meaning interventions deliberately designed to reach and retain men, who emerge from this cohort as the higher-risk group, and for literacy-appropriate counseling and materials that meet patients across the full educational spectrum. They also urge adequately powered follow-up research, ideally with larger samples or longitudinal designs, to clarify whether the commonly cited barriers that fell out of significance in Busia, such as stigma and social support, exert real effects that this study was underpowered to detect. Ethical oversight was thorough, with approval from the Great Lakes University of Kisumu Scientific and Ethical Review Committee and the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation, and written informed consent from all participants. The study received no dedicated funding, and the authors declare no competing interests. As antiretroviral therapy programs worldwide pivot from simply getting patients onto treatment to keeping them virally suppressed for decades, evidence of this granularity, drawn from the borderlands where health systems are tested hardest, will be essential for targeting the last stubborn gaps in the HIV response.

Subject of Research: Determinants of adherence to antiretroviral therapy among HIV patients in Busia County, Kenya

Article Title: Determinants of adherence to antiretroviral therapy among patients in Busia, Kenya

Article References: Mariita, G. M., Ashiono, E., Florence, T. Z., Charles, W., Kimuli, D., & Nyanchoka, V. (2026). Determinants of adherence to antiretroviral therapy among patients in Busia, Kenya. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15739-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15739-w

Keywords: antiretroviral therapy, HIV, adherence, Kenya, Busia County, viral suppression, pharmacy refill records, health services research, sex differences, educational attainment, UNAIDS 95-95-95, cross-sectional study

The research, conducted by Claudia Finger, Sandra Hupka-Brunner and Andrés Gomensoro of the University of Bern, draws on the Swiss TREE study, short for Transitions from Education to Employment. TREE is one of the rare panel surveys in the world that tracks PISA participants over the long term. Its first cohort was launched in 2000, built on a nationally representative sample of Swiss ninth graders tested when the country joined PISA for the first time. The PISA survey achieved a remarkable 95 percent response rate, and roughly half of the initial TREE sample consented to follow-up contact, yielding a baseline of 6,343 respondents. Ten panel waves later, the most recent data cover almost twenty years and follow respondents from early adolescence to an average age of about 35.

This long observation window matters enormously, and it is precisely what most other PISA follow-up studies lack. Previous analyses in Luxembourg, Israel, Australia, Canada and Denmark have generally stopped observing participants in their early or mid-twenties. That cutoff creates two problems. First, more than a fifth of participants are still enrolled in tertiary education at that age, so the labor market outcomes of those already working are biased toward the less educated. Second, economists have shown that early-career earnings estimates suffer from a downward lifecycle bias, because people with higher lifetime earnings experience steeper wage growth. Returns to skills rise sharply until around age 35 and only then stabilize. By following respondents to 35, the Swiss team could capture outcomes far closer to their mature form.

The study’s central finding concerns educational attainment. Among the 2,887 respondents analyzed, 43 percent had obtained a tertiary degree by age 35, whether at a university, a university of applied sciences, or through a professional tertiary qualification. The researchers found that a 100-point increase in PISA reading scores, equivalent to one standard deviation on the international scale, raised the probability of earning a tertiary degree by almost 23 percentage points. Given that the sample average was already 43 percent, that is a substantial effect. Reading literacy, measured with Warm’s Weighted Likelihood Estimator and checked against plausible-value methods, proved to be the single strongest incremental predictor of degree attainment in the models, adding significant explanatory power beyond gender, migration background, parental occupational status and school track.

Perhaps the most technically interesting result involves the interaction between reading skills and Switzerland’s famously early tracking system. Swiss students are streamed into two to four lower-secondary tracks after grade six, at around age twelve, and although policy formally postulates permeability, initial placement is largely irreversible. Test-score distributions overlap substantially across tracks, yet the track itself acts as a powerful signal. The study shows that for students scoring below 500 points, the probability of later obtaining a tertiary degree differs little between tracks. But among higher-scoring students, track-specific differences widen dramatically: being in the lowest rather than the highest track significantly weakens the effect of strong reading skills. In other words, high literacy is especially helpful for students in the academic track, while it matters far less for those placed lower, because lower tracks do not commonly qualify for tertiary education despite formal permeability. Early tracking, the authors conclude, makes educational pathways path-dependent in ways that can neutralize individual skill advantages.

On the labor market, the picture is more nuanced. Neither PISA scores nor tertiary degrees were related to whether respondents were employed at all, which is unsurprising in a country where unemployment stood at just 4.4 percent in 2024 and the vocational education and training system integrates most school leavers into work. But among the 93.5 percent who were employed or self-employed, a 100-point increase in reading scores was associated with 8.5 percent higher gross hourly income, and with higher occupational prestige as measured by the International Socioeconomic Index. Crucially, the income association was fully mediated by tertiary degree attainment, while the occupational status association was reduced but remained visible after controlling for degrees. The direct effect on occupational status, however, was modest: three ISEI points amount to only a fifth of a standard deviation in prestige, corresponding to minor shifts between occupations. In a system with strong vocational specificity and powerful signaling value of certificates, educational credentials appear to be the main channel through which adolescent skills translate into labor market rewards.

The study also ventured beyond education and work into domains that PISA follow-ups rarely touch: health, wellbeing and political interest. Here the results were strikingly mixed. Self-assessed health, life satisfaction on a ten-point scale, and an additive index of positive life attitudes all showed no relationship to reading scores, and none to educational attainment or employment either. The authors offer several possible explanations. Self-rated health is a subjective measure that may capture different aspects than the objective health indicators used in earlier research linking skills to longevity and health service use. Health inequalities by education often widen over adulthood and may simply not have materialized by age 35. The TREE sample also excludes people who migrated to Switzerland after compulsory schooling, potentially underrepresenting more disadvantaged groups, and baseline health and life satisfaction in Switzerland are among the highest in the OECD, compressing the room for skill-based differences to appear.

One unexpected positive finding concerns democracy. Reading literacy at fifteen showed a modest but significant relationship with political interest at thirty-five, partly mediated by tertiary education. Intriguingly, the same analyses run with mathematics and science scores found no such link, suggesting that it is reading literacy specifically, rather than numeracy or scientific understanding, that feeds civic curiosity. In a country whose semi-direct democracy asks citizens to vote several times a year on federal, cantonal and local questions, that distinction carries real weight. It hints that the ability to comprehend complex texts may be a foundational civic skill, one that shapes engagement with political information long after the classroom test is forgotten.

The authors are careful about the limits of their evidence. Panel attrition is a constant concern in a twenty-year study, and the team used logistic-regression-based weights to correct for non-response, finding that participation in the final wave was predicted by prior participation patterns, education, nationality and, notably, PISA reading scores themselves. Between 15 and 17 percent of wave-ten respondents skipped the complementary questionnaire containing the health, wellbeing and political items, so the researchers tested whether adjusting for variables related to that non-response, such as life satisfaction, marriage and children, changed their conclusions; it did not. They also caution that respondents have completed less than half of their life course, that returns to skills may still be underestimated for those still establishing careers, and that health trajectories have decades left to unfold. An eleventh panel wave, fielded when respondents reached an average age of 40, will be released in 2027, with further waves planned at five-year intervals.

Beyond the Swiss case, the study speaks to a broader frustration in assessment research. PISA claims to measure the knowledge and skills needed in adult life, yet the evidence base for that claim has long been thin, and the handful of national follow-ups that exist are barely comparable, each built with different instruments, timelines and frameworks. An OECD report as far back as 2010 called for better coordination of longitudinal follow-ups, arguing that it would for the first time allow cross-national analysis of young people’s pathways from education into work. The Swiss findings, showing that adolescent reading literacy echoes through two decades of educational, economic and even civic life while leaving subjective wellbeing untouched, add a compelling piece to that cumulative puzzle, and a reminder that answering PISA’s central promise will require long-term commitment from funders, sustained panel data, and far more international coordination than currently exists.

Subject of Research: Long-term predictive validity of PISA reading literacy measured at age 15 for educational, labor market, health, wellbeing and political outcomes at age 35 in Switzerland

Article Title: Cognitive skills and long-term life outcomes: evidence from 19 years of PISA 2000 follow-up surveys in Switzerland

Article References: Cognitive skills and long-term life outcomes: evidence from 19 years of PISA 2000 follow-up surveys in Switzerland. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40536-026-00322-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40536-026-00322-w

Keywords: PISA, reading literacy, longitudinal study, TREE study, educational attainment, labor market outcomes, income, political interest, health, wellbeing, school tracking, Switzerland

The study examined Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia, five countries that differ enormously in wealth, food security and education system maturity, yet all of which operate national or large-scale school feeding programmes. The researchers combined nationally representative household surveys with administrative education data, comparing children who received school meals with children who did not, both at the national level and across subnational regions, and separately for boys and girls. Their central finding is striking: beneficiaries of school feeding would gain, on average, 1.3 additional years of schooling compared with non-beneficiaries, with country-level estimates ranging from a low of 0.6 years to a high of 2.3 years.

The logic behind these gains is grounded in decades of nutrition and education research. Chronic food insecurity pushes families toward painful trade-offs, and one of the most common responses is to withdraw children from school, either because the family cannot afford the indirect costs of attendance or because a hungry child cannot concentrate, walk long distances to class or sustain the physical demands of the school day. School meals act as a form of social protection, transferring resources directly to households while strengthening the incentive to keep children enrolled. When a nutritious meal arrives reliably at school, the marginal cost of sending a child falls, and the marginal benefit rises, making dropout less likely and grade progression more likely.

Translating additional schooling into money is where the study becomes an economic argument as much as an educational one. The researchers estimated the returns to education using adapted Mincer equations, the workhorse framework of labour economics that relates log earnings to years of schooling and experience, supplemented where appropriate by published estimates from the global literature. Across the five countries, each additional year of education was associated, on average, with 13.3 per cent higher earnings, with estimates ranging from 9.5 per cent to 19.5 per cent. Combining the schooling gains with these returns, the team projected that school feeding beneficiaries would see lifetime earnings approximately 25.6 per cent higher than comparable children who did not receive meals, an enormous cumulative effect originating from what is often regarded as a modest, routine intervention.

The disaggregated analysis reveals where those benefits concentrate. Because the researchers modelled impacts both nationally and subnationally, they could identify the regions within each country where school feeding is likely to deliver the largest educational payoffs. Unsurprisingly, the greatest gains appear in disadvantaged areas, where baseline dropout rates are high, food insecurity is severe and alternative social protection is thin. In such settings, the meal programme effectively compensates for broader gaps in the social safety net. The analysis by sex also allows the programme’s role in closing gender gaps in schooling to be examined, an important consideration given that girls in low-income settings are often the first to be withdrawn from school when household resources tighten, and given the well-documented downstream benefits of girls’ education for fertility, child mortality and intergenerational health.

The methodological machinery behind these estimates is worth unpacking, because the authors are candid about its limits. In Ethiopia and Malawi, where rich household survey data were available, including the Ethiopian Socioeconomic Survey and multiple rounds of the Malawi Integrated Household Survey, the team estimated transitions between schooling states directly from observed data. For Burundi, Mozambique and Namibia, they constructed a documented transition-matrix framework, using education management information system data and national statistics to model how beneficiary and non-beneficiary cohorts progress through the school system. The schooling gains were then propagated through Mincerian or literature-based returns to produce projected earnings differentials. The analytic code, along with processing and estimation pipelines for the countries with public data, has been released openly on GitHub, an unusually transparent step that allows other researchers to reproduce, stress-test and extend the modelling.

That transparency matters because the authors themselves label their headline numbers as observational plausible upper bounds rather than causal guarantees. Beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries are not randomly assigned; school feeding programmes are typically targeted, deliberately or otherwise, toward needier regions, which complicates naive comparisons. The team ran extensive sensitivity analyses, visualised in their published heat maps, to explore how alternative assumptions about returns to education, transition probabilities and programme coverage affect the results, and the qualitative conclusion, that school feeding meaningfully increases retention and lifetime earnings, is robust across specifications. Even so, they explicitly call for new longitudinal quasi-experimental studies, ideally exploiting staggered programme rollouts or sharp eligibility thresholds, to pin down causal estimates with the precision that policy commitments of this scale deserve.

Even interpreted as upper bounds, the findings arrive at a consequential moment. School feeding has expanded dramatically worldwide, reaching hundreds of millions of children, and is increasingly championed not merely as a nutrition intervention but as a cross-sectoral investment spanning health, education and social protection. Previous systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found positive but heterogeneous effects of school meals on enrolment, attendance and learning, and value-for-money studies have been completed or are underway in each of the five study countries under the Research Consortium for School Health and Nutrition, funded through an original grant from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation with follow-on support from the World Food Programme and other partners. The new Nature Health analysis adds a lifetime-earnings dimension to that evidence base, converting years of schooling into the currency that finance ministries ultimately weigh.

The economic framing also reframes the cost debate. School feeding programmes require sustained procurement of food, logistics and administration, and critics have long questioned whether the resources might deliver more if spent on textbooks, teacher training or direct cash transfers. But the earnings projections here suggest that the benefits of keeping children in school compound over entire working lives, and that they accrue disproportionately to the poorest regions, where the marginal social value of a retained pupil is highest. There are broader dividends as well, beyond the individual wage premium: parental education is strongly linked to child survival, and education shifts fertility patterns and population health in ways that markets do not fully capture. A meal that keeps a girl in school for two extra years may influence the health and schooling of the next generation.

For the five countries studied, and for the many others watching, the message is that school meals should be evaluated with the same seriousness as any major public investment, using data on who benefits, where the gains are largest and what the long-run returns look like. The Harvard-led team’s open data and code make that kind of evaluation more feasible than ever. What remains is the harder scientific task they themselves identify: following real cohorts of children over time, with designs that isolate the causal effect of the meal from the poverty that motivates it. Until then, the numbers stand as a provocative estimate that one of the oldest interventions in the development toolkit, feeding hungry children at school, may quietly be one of the highest-return investments a government can make.

Subject of Research: Estimated effects of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and lifetime economic returns in Burundi, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Namibia

Article Title: Impact of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and economic returns in five African countries

Article References: Forzy, T., Ramponi, F., Iversen, I., Durizzo, K., Kim, S., Gautam, P., Avallone, S., Memirie, S. T., Habtemichael, M., Getnet, F., Wogasso, Y., Peterson, H., Masamba, K., Saka, A., Nkengurutse, J., Ndayitwayeko, W.-M., Ntunzwenimana, M., Bigirimana, L., Mbengue, M., … Verguet, S. (2026). Impact of school feeding programmes on educational attainment and economic returns in five African countries. Nature Health. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44360-026-00176-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44360-026-00176-0

Keywords: school feeding, educational attainment, lifetime earnings, sub-Saharan Africa, returns to education, dropout, social protection, Mincer equation, food security, Nature Health, Harvard Chan School, education economics