Does education increase your IQ?
Last updated 1 August 2026
Yes. This is the one place on this site where the answer to "can you raise IQ" is a straightforward yes. A 2018 meta-analysis covering 42 datasets and more than 600,000 participants found that each additional year of education raises cognitive ability by approximately 1 to 5 IQ points, and that the gains persist across the lifespan.
Almost everything marketed as raising intelligence does not survive testing. Education does, and it does so under research designs specifically built to rule out the obvious objection.
The objection that had to be answered first
Education and IQ scores are strongly correlated. That much has never been in doubt. The difficulty is that the correlation has two available explanations pointing in opposite directions.
People with higher cognitive ability tend to stay in education longer. On that reading, schooling does not cause the ability; the ability causes the schooling. Every naive study of education and IQ is vulnerable to this, and for decades it was the reason the question stayed open.
Answering it requires designs where the amount of education someone received was determined by something other than their ability.
The three designs, and why they work
Stuart Ritchie and Elliot Tucker-Drob published How Much Does Education Improve Intelligence? A Meta-Analysis in Psychological Science in 2018. They pooled three categories of quasi-experimental study, each attacking the confound differently.
Control for prior intelligence. Measure cognitive ability before the additional education, then again afterwards. If more able students simply stay longer, controlling for the earlier score should remove the effect. It does not.
Compulsory schooling policy changes. When a country raises its school leaving age, a cohort receives an extra year of education for reasons that have nothing to do with their individual ability. Comparing cohorts either side of the change is close to a natural experiment, with the policy acting as an instrumental variable.
School-entry age cutoffs. Children born days apart on either side of an enrolment cutoff start school a year apart. At the point of the cutoff the two groups are effectively identical in every respect except how much schooling they have had. This regression-discontinuity design is the closest thing to random assignment available.
What they found
Across 142 effect sizes drawn from 42 datasets and over 600,000 participants, the estimate was consistent: approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for each additional year of education.
Two further findings matter as much as the headline number. The effects persisted across the lifespan rather than fading after the schooling ended. And they appeared across all broad categories of cognitive ability studied, not only in the narrow skills a classroom directly drills.
The authors' conclusion was that education appears to be the most consistent, robust and durable method yet identified for raising intelligence. That is unusually strong language for a meta-analysis, and it reflects how little else in the field survives this level of scrutiny.
What the range means, and why it is wide
One to five points is a broad band, and the width is informative rather than a sign of weakness. The estimate varies by study design, by the age at which the outcome was measured, and by the population studied. A range that honestly reports this variation is more useful than a single figure that conceals it.
At the bottom of the range, a year of education buys about a fifth of a standard deviation less than nothing you would notice in yourself. At the top, five points is a third of a standard deviation and genuinely substantial. Over the several years that separate leaving school early from completing a degree, even the low estimate accumulates into something visible on a population level.
What this does not mean
It does not mean education is a route to a high score on a test you are about to sit. The effect operates over years, not weeks, and it is measured across populations rather than promised to individuals.
It does not mean intelligence is unlimited or infinitely malleable. Cognitive ability remains substantially heritable, and the education effect coexists with that rather than contradicting it.
And it does not rescue shorter cognitive interventions by association. If a full year of formal schooling — hundreds of hours of structured, varied, demanding work — moves the needle by a handful of points, a few weeks of a training app moving it further is not a plausible claim. Some researchers have made exactly this argument: the education finding sets a ceiling on what brief training can credibly deliver.
The practical reading
If your interest is your own cognitive development rather than a number, the finding points somewhere specific. Sustained, structured engagement with difficult material over years is the intervention with evidence behind it. Not a course you skim, and not a subscription. The kind of learning that is hard while you are doing it.
That is also, conveniently, the kind of learning that produces knowledge and skills worth having regardless of what any test says about you.
Frequently asked questions
How many IQ points is a year of education worth?
Do the gains fade after you leave education?
Does this mean anyone can raise their IQ substantially?
If education works, why does brain training not?
More in this series
- Does brain training increase IQ?Near transfer, far transfer, and why the games get easier while nothing else does.
- Does dual n-back work?The 2008 result that started it, and what the placebo-controlled replication found.
- Why does my IQ score change?Practice effects, confidence bands, and why two results rarely match.