My current research focuses on four primary categories of research questions: 1) Who persists through high school; 2) Who gains access to postsecondary institutions and why; 3) Who persists through college and why, and; 4) Who eventually completes their postsecondary education and earns some type of degree or certificate and why? In order to address these sets of questions, this research project focuses on two separate cohorts of Texas students. Students in the first cohort were high school freshman in the school year 2003-04, while students in the second cohort were high school seniors in the 2003-04 school year. As we began following Cohort 1 students in their freshman year, this cohort was studied to determine their high school persistence patterns, their initial college access rates, and the factors that predicted access to postsecondary institutions. Because the second cohort of students graduated from high school in 2004 and had thus been out of high school for six years at the time of this study, this cohort was analyzed for its postsecondary persistence patterns and its four- and six-year college graduation rates.