This paper tests three explanations for the high educational expectations of Asian-American high school students living in the United States: favorable socioeconomic and background characteristics, demonstrated academic ability, and cultural values conducive to education. We focus on differences in the relevance of these explanations across Asian-American ethnic groups. With data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), 1988-1992, we employ five multivariate regression models to explain differences in educational expectations between Asian-American ethnic groups and whites, both for the base year and for changes over time. We find much diversity in the factors that shape educational expectations and effect changes in them across Asian-American ethnic groups. The educational expectations of groups that are well-assimilated into U.S. society are principally influenced by socioeconomic and demographic factors, while parental expectations explain much of childrens high educational expectations for recent immigrant refugees.

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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. 0 ne outgrowth of what Kerr (1 991 :xii) Statistics, NCES 2000:286). The increase in referred to as "the great transforma-graduate degrees outpaced the rate of tion" of higher education in the growth in undergraduate degrees to such an United States has been a dramatic rise in the extent that whereas in 1960, one out of four scale and significance of postgraduate pro-degree recipients were graduate students, by grams. In terms of raw figures, whereas from 1997, the ratio was one out of three. In the 1960 to 1997, the number of bachelor's wake of the post-1 960 expansion, there is evidegrees awarded tripled, the number of mas-dence that graduate degrees became more ter's degrees, first-professional degrees important than ever before as passports to (including dentistry, medicine, optometry, high-paying, prestigious occupations osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, (Cappell and Pipkin 1990; Kingston and veterinary medicine, chiropractic medicine, Clawson 1990; Useem and Karabel 1986). law, and theology), and doctoral degrees Although roughly one-third of higher edumore than quadrupled, from 120,437 to cation's human products are graduate stu-544,007 (National Center for Education dents, sociologists know little about the rela

According to the majority-minority paradigm, racial and ethnic minorities have lower socioeconomic characteristics than whites owing to discrimination. Asian Americans defy this conventional view, however, at least on average. Asian Americans tend to have higher mean levels of educational achievements, and several recent studies indicate approximate parity with whites in most arenas of the labor market for those Asian Americans who were schooled in the United

This article explores the relationship between economic potential and rates of entry into marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the 1990 census and the 1980-1992 High School and Beyond (Sophomore Cohort), we developed a method for explicitly estimating five time-varying measures of earnings potential. The analyses of union formation are based on an intergenerational panel study of parents and children, to which our measures of earnings potential were appended. The results indicate that all five measures of earnings potential strongly and positively influence the likelihood of marriage for men, but not for women. Earnings potential does not affect entry into cohabiting unions for either men or women.