Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979, this article examines the relationship between adolescents' educational and occupational expectations, and how they correspond to their subsequent labor market outcomes in adulthood. We show that over-aligned adolescents, those who expect to obtain more education than is necessary…

Research often considers vertical stratification between U.S. higher education institutions. Yet differences also exist within higher education institutions, which we term "organizational segmentation." We understand organizational segmentation as a consequence of the external "prestige economy," which favors research revenues…

Employing NCES databases, we investigate how college selectivity influences job satisfaction and prestige from the 1970s to the 1990s and across different racial categories. We find that the effect of college selectivity has essentially disappeared over time and that minority students are particularly disadvantaged with respect to job satisfaction.