ABSTRACT
Graduate education is an increasingly important part of the opportunity structure in the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK).1 With many sectors of the labor market saturated with baccalaureate degrees, many employers have come to expect graduate degrees for hiring and/or promotion (Collins, 2002; Wakeling, 2007), in such middle-class fields as education, business, social work, nursing, and other health sciences and health services. The choice to pursue graduate education is thus closely related to career choice for many, but it is most fully explained empirically by a combination of internal (e.g. personal, psychological) and external (e.g. environmental, contextual) factors. Perna (2004) found that academic and financial resources, as well as social and cultural capital, contributed to graduate school enrollment outcomes. Other studies of postgraduate enrollment in the U.S. have examined characteristics of a student’s undergraduate institution (e.g. Millett, 2003; Mullen, Goyette, & Soares, 2003), debt accumulated as an undergraduate (Chen & Bahr, 2012; Malcom & Dowd, 2012), socioeconomic status (Stolzenberg, 1994; Zhang, 2005), and the availability of funding (Millett, 2003; Nevill & Chen, 2007) in relation to pursuit of graduate or professional education.
