This report profiles undergraduates enrolled in postsecondary education for the academic year 1992-93. It relies on data from the 1992-93 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, third in a series conducted by the Department of Education. The report begins with an essay that explores the extent to which undergraduates have outside responsibilities and enrollment patterns that increase their risk of not attaining a degree or postsecondary certificate. Following the essay, a compendium of tables provides comprehensive information about enrollment patterns, programs of study, student characteristics, financial aid receipt and employment, students' educational aspirations, and their community service participation. Not since the 1970s has the typical postsecondary student been a recent high school graduate enrolled full-time at a four-year school, and working toward a Bachelor's degree. On the contrary, such students represented only about one-third of undergraduates enrolled in 1992-93. The first section of the compendium contains detailed risk factor tables, and the remaining sections are marked to highlight topic findings. (Contains 9 text tables, 8 figures, and 58 tables in the compendium.) (SLD)

The search for reliable information on the well-being of America's young is vital to designing programs to improve their lives. Yet social scientists are concerned that many measurements of children's physical and emotional health are inadequate, misleading, or outdated, leaving policymakers ill-informed. Indicators of Children's Well-Being is an ambitious inquiry into current efforts to monitor children from the prenatal period through adolescence. Working with the most up-to-date statistical sources, experts from multiple disciplines assess how data on physical development, education, economic security, family and neighborhood conditions, and social behavior are collected and analyzed, what findings they reveal, and what improvements are needed to create a more comprehensive and policy-relevant system of measurement. Today's climate of welfare reform has opened new possibilities for program innovation and experimentation, but it has also intensified the need for a clearly defined and wide-ranging empirical framework to pinpoint where help is needed and what interventions will succeed. Indicators of Children's Well-Being emphasizes the importance of accurate studies that address real problems. Essays on children's material well-being show why income data must be supplemented with assessments of housing, medical care, household expenditure, food consumption, and education. Other contributors urge refinements to existing survey instruments such as the Census and the Current Population Survey. The usefulness of records from human service agencies, child welfare records, and juvenile court statistics is also evaluated.