Change in the Stratification of Educational Expectations and Their Realization

What do recent trends toward increasingly ambitious educational expectations and ris-ing college completion rates mean for the stratification of higher education? This article shows that the odds of achieving expectations for a bachelor’s degree increased across 15 cohorts of young adults, and to a lesser extent, for expectations to attend graduate/profes-sional school. Gender-related constraints on realizing expectations for a bachelor’s degree weakened, while constraints associated with minority racial/ethnic and lower socioeco-nomic statuses did not. Recent trends in educational stratification were thus a mixture of fulfilled expectations for growing proportions of some young adults, but continued social constraints for many others. Note, these results are derived from the experiences of high school seniors successfully reinterviewed over time, who are advantaged relative to school dropouts and nonrespondents. The expansion of higher education in the United States during the last half of the 20th century resulted in one of the most highly educated adult populations in the world. At the turn of the 21st century, one in four adults age 25 and older had at least a bach