5
The profession category includes such job titles as licensed medical professionals, legal professionals, engineers, and
human service professionals. Professions were regarded as those which required a college degree, and also entailed
having theoretical knowledge as well as training in the job itself. Semi-professions included such jobs as financial
services, legal support, lab technicians, and computer operators. These jobs require a higher level of education, but
do not necessarily entail the need for a scientific or theoretical background in the subject at hand. Service/semi-
skilled jobs included secretaries, clerks, cooks, and craftsmen. This job category emphasizes the need for training in
particular skills, as well as experience, but does not require higher levels of educational attainment. The ‘other’
category included occupations in farming, forestry, laborers, and the military. For the purposes of these analyses, the
category of ‘homemaker’ was not included.
The family and parental characteristics of young adults were assessed with a variety of measures. Several
of these questions, asked of the parent, pertain to household size and family structure. Parents were asked if they
were a single parent (coded as 1=singe parent, 0=two-parent). The income from 1991 (the year prior to the
respondents’ senior year in high school) is included (with values ranging from 1 “$0" to 15 “$200,000). The
respective educational attainment of both parents and siblings may potentially influence students’ academic
performance and subsequent occupational attainment. Parents’ educational attainment was coded as: 1) did not
finish high school, 2) high school graduate or GED, 3) graduated from high school and trade school, 4) college
graduate, 5) M.A. or equivalent, 6) Ph.D., M.D., or equivalent. Similar to the effect of parental educational, it is also
proposed that parental employment represents a potential modeling effect within families. Using the same job
coding scheme as it utilized by the dependent measures, parents’ occupations were coded as being professional
(coded as 1) or not (coded as 0). Parents were similarly asked how often they spent time doing things with their
student (coded as 1) never/rarely, 2) less than once a week, 3) once/twice a week, 4) almost every day). Since the
success of an individual child may be influenced by the size of the family, the number of siblings is also included.
Finally, parents were asked about their own preferences for their students educational attainment, with the resultant
measure, college aspiration, indicating that they want their child to attain a bachelor’s degree or better (coded as
1=yes, 0=no).
Individual characteristics were assessed using responses taken directly from the young adults’ themselves.
Convention