Toward an Improved Measure of Educational Attainment in Social Stratification Research Alan C. Kerckhoff, † Elizabeth Dietrich Ezell, and J. Scott Brown Duke University Standard schemes for classifying educational attainment have been developed in response to the noncomparability of the credentials awarded by different societies’ educational systems. The ISCED and CASMIN schemes are the most widely used. To use these standard classification schemes, each society’s indigenous credentials must be reclassified into the standard categories. This article shows that the CASMIN scheme reproduces the education– occupation association produced by the indigenous credentials more closely for Great Britain and The Netherlands, while ISCED does so for the United States. Weaknesses in the CASMIN scheme for the United States are identified, and a revised CASMIN scheme is proposed. The revised CASMIN scheme is a great improve- ment over the original for the United States and a slight improvement for Great Britain and The Netherlands. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: measurement; educational attainment; social stratification; comparative. Research on social stratification and mobility has increasingly involved cross- societal comparisons during the past few decades. Advances in data collection and analytic procedures have increased the value of this research. Yet, the increased opportunities to compare societies also pose important challenges, one of which is the challenge of developing truly comparable measures across societies. This article is concerned with the comparability of measures of edu- cational attainment in social stratification research. We examine the comparative appropriateness of two standard methods of measuring educational attainment, the ISCED and CASMIN classifications. We demonstrate the superiority of the CASMIN over the ISCED scheme in measur- Financial support for this research from Statistics Canada, the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, and the Spencer Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Scott Lynch provided valuable methodological assistance. Michelle Dylan contributed in the early phases of the research. An earlier version of this article was presented at the meeting of Research Committee 28 (Social Stratification and Mobility) of the International Sociological Association, Madison (WI), August 12, 1999. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Elizabeth Dietrich Ezell, Department of Sociology, Box 90088, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708. Fax: (919) 660-5623. E-mail: lezell@soc.duke.edu. † Social Science Research notes with sadness that Dr. Kerckhoff passed away on December 21, 2001. Social Science Research 31, 99 –123 (2002) doi:10.1006/ssre.2001.0720, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on 99 0049-089X/02 $35.00 © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) All rights reserved.