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