The first panel of a three-year longitudinal study was conducted to investigate the process by which youth form career expectations. The study was designed around a cross-sectional path model of career expectations drawn from the sociological literature on status attainment and is based on differential equations in which all expectation variables…

Characteristics and attendance patterns of persisters and dropouts from college and vocational/technical schools were studied, and a model of the persistence process was tested using data from the National Longitudinal Study (NLS), which surveyed high school seniors in 1972, with followup surveys in 1973 and 1974. Student persistence was defined…