ABSTRACT
For at least fifty years the vast majority of Ameri-cans have attended high school, and a solidmajority have graduated from high school. But this near-universal enrollment of adolescents in high school is a historically recent phenomenon. In 1900 barely 10 percent of fourteen to seventeen year olds were enrolled in school. During the next five decades school enrollment in this age group exploded from the atypical to the norm: to 31 percent in the 1920, 50 percent in 1930, 73 percent in 1940, 76 percent in 1950, and 87 percent in 1960.
