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Data from a study of college aspirations among 40,000 Minnesota adolescents indicate that the relationship of family size to aspirations is somewhat higher among Protestants than Catholics. Overall aspirational differences between religious groups are minor. Further analysis suggests that these differences are probably not a function of financial capacities but rather of more basic socialization practices. The data are used to illustrate an alternative approach in analyzing the relevance of religion to contemporary society: examining processual differences between religious groups rather than concentrating only on outcomes—such as net differences in aspirations. The paper concludes by speculating that social process may be critical in distinguishing Protestants from Catholics but has generally been neglected in contemporary research on religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a summery to a paper that was delivered in the fifty-first and fifty-second annual meeting of the American Sociological Society. Max Weber's thesis propounded that Protestants and Catholics display differential attitudes toward professional and occupational choices and, thus, prefer different fields of learning when entering institutes of higher education. Contrary to Weber's thesis it was found that a somewhat larger percentage of Catholics than of Protestants had selected a business studies program. Significant differences, however, were found with regard to the following background factors: Only one-third of the Catholic, but more than half of the Protestant parents had a college education.