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The educational expectations of 10th-graders have dramatically increased from 1980 to 2002. Their rise is attributable in part to the changing educational composition of students' parents and related to the educational profiles of their expected occupations. Students whose parents have gone to college are more likely to attend college themselves, and students expect occupations that are more prestigious in 2002 than in 1980. The educational requirements of particular occupation categories have risen only slightly. These analyses also reveal that educational expectations in recent cohorts are more loosely linked to social background and occupational plans than they were in 1980. The declining importance of parents' background and the decoupling of educational and occupational plans, in addition to a strong and significant effect of cohort on educational expectations, suggest that the expectation of four-year college attainment is indeed becoming the norm.

Presumed competent, Asian Americans exhibit the highest level of education and median household income of all major US ethnoracial groups. On average, they outpace all groups in the domain of education, yet they do not maintain their advantage in the labor market. The question of bias against Asian Americans has taken center stage in the most recent US Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, but the attention has been on university admissions. We broaden the focus and rewrite the question to consider how Asian Americans seek to preempt bias in the labor market by strategically adapting to mitigate it. Strategic adaptation begins with precollege education, continues with college choice and major, and entails acquiring elite credentials that signal hard skills and merit. The strategy falls short of obviating bias altogether, however. We show how Asian Americans' labor market earnings and mobility vary by gender, nativity, national origin, place of education, and field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades now, social scientists interested in the relationship between higher education and social stratification have directed their research efforts toward evaluating how college access is conditioned by students' [...]

Although sociologists have found direct links between parents' education and the high school and college educational attainments of their offspring, researchers have been surprised to find no parental effects on educational enrollments beyond college. Postgraduate matriculation appears to result from academic success in college, divorced from parents' educational capital. Using new data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, the authors reexamine this issue and extend the literature by disaggregating graduate programs by type. They find that parents' education has no effect on their children's entry into MBA programs and only a small influence on entry into master's programs; however, there is a strong effect of parents' education on entry into first-professional and doctoral programs. The role of parental education is largely indirect, working primarily through the characteristics of a student's undergraduate institution, academic performance, educational expectations, and career values. In addition, college performance maintains a strong, independent effect on enrollment in graduate school.

The study presented here explored three factors that may explain why distinct Asian American groups have higher educational expectations than do whites: favorable socioeconomic and background characteristics, demonstrated academic ability, and parents' high expectations. With data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study, the authors used linear and logistic multivariate regression models to examine these differences in educational expectations. The analyses indicated that although all Asian American ethnic groups have higher expectations than whites, the higher educational expectations of Asian American groups that are well assimilated into U.S. society are principally influenced by socioeconomic and demographic factors. Parental expectations generally explain a large portion of children's high educational expectations for all Asian American groups.

Vietnam has a strong public postsecondary education sector that has only recently begun to experience growth in nonpublic institutions. I investigate how the growth of non-public institutions may be related to stratification in Vietnam. I find that these institutions are more likely to serve more advantaged students from South Vietnam. Students pay higher costs to attend them; however, they choose more lucrative fields, perhaps as a way to ensure good returns to this investment. This research suggests that as the private sector in Vietnam expands, the influence of family background and region of residence on postsecondary attendance may grow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the changing racial composition of schools in the U.S. and its effect on the perceived quality of schools from 1999 to 2012, with a focus on the metropolitan area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The authors explore the impact of moderate changes in the representation of black students in U.S. schools during the time frame of four to five years. The authors discuss the role of racial threat theory relating to their research findings. The authors contend that despite the current conditions of the schools, including changes in school safety, standardizes test scores and school poverty, that white neighborhood residents tend to perceive a reduction of the quality of their schools.

In this paper, we propose a synthetic framework, “strategic adaptation,” for understanding the social mobility process of Asian Americans. We argue that Asian Americans consciously choose occupations where they can effectively cope with potential discrimination and other disadvantages by achieving marketable credentials. Our empirical analyses are primarily based on data from the 1988–1994 National Educational Longitudinal Survey. There are four main findings from our study. First, Asian American youth tend to choose occupations with a high representation of Asian workers and high average earnings/education, relative to whites, even after controlling for socioeconomic background and academic performance. Second, Asians are more likely than whites to expect to enter college and to major in fields that have high financial payoffs. Third, a large fraction of this racial gap is attributable to occupational expectation. Finally, Asians are more likely than are whites to actually enroll in college and to pursue high-earning majors, and these racial differences are attributable to both educational expectation and occupational expectation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]