The expansion of college access, particularly since 1970, to individuals of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and social class origins has raised a host of complex and important public policy issues. What are the implications for college graduation rates, labor market returns to the college degree, and generational mobility? These are the key questions addressed by Paul Attewell and David E. Lavin's groundbreaking book, Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations? Their highly accessible book paints a thoughtful picture of the multilayered mechanisms through which higher education serves as a lever for social mobility in the United States. The authors specifically focus on women from two longitudinal, multigenerational data sets a followup of students who entered the City University of New York (CUNY) in the wake of its controversial 1970 policy to expand access, known as open admissions, and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), which includes both high school students who transitioned to college and those who did not. The upsurge of college enrollments has been well documented, but the ensuing debates around the opening up of higher education have been contentious and, as the authors persuasively demonstrate, often lacking in relevant evidence. Enrollments at four-year colleges have increased twofold since 1970, and as one example, more than 80% of the high school class of 1992 had gone to college in the eight-year span since completing high school. Among poor and minority Americans, formerly excluded from the ranks of higher education, college typically means less selective and public colleges and universities. Meanwhile, the debates have centered on whether the phenomenon of mass higher education is essentially a proxy for mass failures (read: college dropouts), or, at best, a diluted college degree worth less in the labor market than in the past. As the authors write, mass higher education is regarded in some quarters as "conferring devalued degrees upon unworthy students" (p. 1). It is within this terrain of who completes a college degree, and the relative gains, if any, in the lives of the individual recipient and the recipient's children where Attewell and Lavin focus much of their analyses. The authors decide to focus on women, as these would be more likely to have custody of and general knowledge of their children, thus providing purchase to the