Using either an individuals' socioeconomic or ethnic status to predict his prospects for academic achievement or future employment is considered likely to be inaccurate and perhaps even immoral. The action implications of present socioeconomic and ethnic patterns of goal attainment are said to be in dispute. In order to contemplate the value of different actions, it is held necessary to get past the labels "middle class" and "lower class", "black,""white,""nonwhite," and so on, to specific causal processes; it must first be recognized how labeling is itself one of the crucial processes involved in the relationship of social class and ethnicity to goal attainment. Several themes of current research are said to suggest the value of going beyond labels. For instance, a child born into a family without the characteristics associated with its socioeconomic or ethnic category has a different prospect for goal attainment from that of the typical child of that category, provided that child has not been categorized in a way that blocks this prospect. The processes associated with lower status groups are not considered necessarily of an inferior type. It is asserted that, given that social processes reinforce on another, only the most fundamental social intervention could be expected to alter seriously the life prospects of the typical individual of a given group in American society today. (Author/JM)