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The objectives of this study were to review the current literature on status attainment and student college choice and to develop and test a structural model of predisposition to attend college. Family and student background characteristics, parents' educational expectations for students, level of student involvement in school, and student achievement were cited as influences on students' predisposition toward postsecondary education and were the chief components of the model. Data from 2,497 ninth-grade students and their parents were used to test the model using LISREL. Parents' expectations exerted the strongest influence throughout the model. Parents' education, student gender, high school GPA, and high school experiences also contributed significantly in explaining students' aspirations.DON HOSSLER is an associate professor in the School of Education, Rm. 226, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405. He specializes in research on higher education, college students, and finance. FRANCES K. STAGE is an associate professor in the School of Education, Rm. 236, Indiana University. She specializes in research on college students and research methods.

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With this volume we seek to demonstrate the ways that we as scholars turn our quantitative skills toward asking and answering critical questions in higher education research. We examine a variety of higher education issues from a critical stance, using quantitative methods. Collectively, our work demonstrates ways of moving beyond traditional conceptualizations of quantitative research. We use our scholarship to push the boundaries of what we know by questioning mainstream notions of higher education through the examination of policies, the reframing of theories and measures, and the reexamination of traditional questions for nontraditional populations. Although the work presented here is divergent, the commonality of the presentations lies in each scholar's critical approach to conventional quantitative scholarship.In the following chapters the authors focus on research questions rather than methods or findings. They describe the ways conventional research drove them to the questions of their studies, and then tell how those results challenged the status quo. Because the perspective of this volume is on the framing of the research questions, methods and results are secondary and are presented only to illustrate various applications of critical quantitative inquiry. We hope to demonstrate that being a quantitative criticalist comes with the questions we ask, not with the methods we use to answer them.In this chapter, I invoke various scholars' definitions of critical inquiry, and relying primarily on Kincheloe and McLaren (1994)