Graduating from college is widely associated with social and personal advancement, yet many young graduates are not experiencing these benefits. Drawing on 127 interviews with college graduates in the United States and Spain who face employment precarity or economic instability, this study asks: How do these graduates understand their social…

Students with aligned educational and occupational expectations have improved college and labor market outcomes. Despite extensive knowledge about the ways social background and school context contribute to educational expectations, less is known about the role of social intuitions in shaping expectational alignment. Drawing on data from the 2009…

In the United States, women are more likely than men to enter and complete college, but they remain underrepresented among baccalaureates in science-related majors. We show that in a cohort of college entrants who graduated from high school in 2004, men were more than twice as likely as women to complete baccalaureate degrees in science,…

Why is it that children of immigrants often outdo their ethnic majority peers in educational aspirations yet struggle to keep pace with their achievements? This article advances the explanation that many immigrant communities, while positively selected on education, still have moderate absolute levels of schooling. Therefore, parents' education…

Increasing numbers of low-income and minority youth are now pursuing shorter-duration sub-baccalaureate credentials at for-profit trade and technical schools. However, many students drop out of these schools, leaving with large debts and few job prospects. Despite these dismal outcomes, we know very little about students' experiences in for-profit…

In this article, a measure of students' beliefs is constructed from three sources of information on 12,509 high school seniors from the Education Longitudinal Study (2002 to 2006). First, verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans, drawn from restricted-access data records, are coded into 1,220 categories to capture detailed…

Peer relationships in secondary schools in two different cultural areas of India are compared. A general theory of status relations and a specification of the distinctive cultural features of each area are used to explain the observed differences in peer inequality, clique formation, petty deviance, putdowns, fashion consciousness, romantic…

As the numbers of working-class students at university grow, we need to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which they consolidate their working-class habitus with the middle-class culture of the academic field. Drawing on data from a four-year longitudinal, qualitative study of working-class students at a large,…

An argument on the conditions under which colleges will be able to affect the role allocation of students emphasizes that colleges may differ in the kinds of people they are expected to produce and in the kinds of changes in individuals that they can expect to affect. (Author/KM)

In examining the relationship between programme composition and post-secondary plans for a sample of Canadian technical high school students, students in solely technical high schools were found to have higher aspirations than university preparatory students. (Author/KM)

Using a longitudinal study of a national sample of white males, this study clarifies how socialization is related to mobility in educational and occupational attainment. (Author/DE)

A study of college graduates from the 1960s indicated that compared with men, women showed greater instability in occupational expectations; reaped lesser returns in occupational status from investments in advanced education; and were less likely to realize their occupational expectations. (Author/AV)

Examines occupational, income, and educational aspirations among recent Mexican and Cuban immigrants to the United States. Aspirations appear to be set through a rational assessment of past attainments and skills. Reviews implications for immigrants'"dreams of fantasy" when they first arrive in the United States. (Author/AV)

This study examines and assesses occupational knowledge among 300 high school males in eastern Washington. Interviews of these students about occupations available in their region and about job information they had received indicated that there was little increase in occupational knowledge during the high school years. The author concludes that…

Formulates two models for the process of occupational achievement over time. Both include the effects of changes in education on changes in occupational achievement. There is a slight increase in rates of change for both education and occupation over time and the higher the level of one's education, the greater the gain in occupational status.…