The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools; the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. We use…

We assess the intergenerational educational mobility of recent cohorts of high school graduates to consider whether Hispanics' lagging postsecondary attainment reflects a temporary lull due to immigration of low education parents or a more enduring pattern of unequal transmission of social status relative to whites. Using data from three national…

This article uses four data sets to assess changes in the relative weights of test- and performance-based merit criteria on college enrollment during the 1980s and 1990s and considers their significance for affirmative action. Our results support the "shifting meritocracy" hypothesis, revealed by selective postsecondary institutions'…