This book is an outgrowth of an interdisciplinary seminar on achievement processes. The 15 chapters of this book are distributed into three substantive sections. Part One includes a series of chapters dealing in one way or another with achievement in the life cycle. One chapter discusses the causes and consequences of higher education and interprets a structural equation model, based on longitudinal data from a large sample of Wisconsin youth. Part Tuo, Institutional Effects, includes a series of papers that deal with the effects of various features and climates of school and colleges on cognitive and socioeconomic achievement. One chapter examines the "very difficult" question of the effects of school resources on students' intellectual and attitudinal development, reviewing and evaluating the numerous studies that were stimulated by the Coleman report. Part Three, Methodological Issues, contains two chapters, both of which deal with specific methodological problems. Almost every chapter in the book contains extensive methodological discussions, and several modify or extend existing statistical techniques, but their principal focus is on substantive issues and not on methodological developments. (Author/JM)