What do recent trends toward increasingly ambitious educational expectations and rising 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…

Family connections, traditional activities, educational goals, and fatalism are themes running throughout research and published observations about Appalachia. Information from 3 days of interviews with the author's grandmother, an 87-year-old Appalachian woman, is compared to these common research themes. The interviewee's experiences concerning…

This paper examines factors in the very low college participation rate in certain south-central Pennsylvania counties, in order to develop strategies for increasing participation. The paper examines college participation through a series of interviews with elementary school students, recent high school graduates not attending college, school and…

For more than three decades, the courts have attempted to resolve the effects of desegregation on educational quality and educational access. This report reviews a recent court ruling on the 26-year-old desegregation case, Mapp versus Board of Education, in relation to emerging demographic patterns in the Chattanooga (Tennessee) Public Schools…