Over the past half century, amid the broader expansion of higher education, graduate education has expanded and diversified rapidly. While a large body of research on higher education stratification has emerged, few studies have investigated the graduate level: how students evaluate, navigate, and pursue graduate education amid economic changes and unprecedented student debt. This dissertation addresses this gap by asking three questions, at increasing levels of granularity, about young adults’ access to and outcomes of graduate education. The first chapter asks how family class background is associated with graduate enrollment. Using a nationally-representative sample of college graduates (B&B:08/18), I find evidence that parental graduate education has a privileged role in its associations with doctoral enrollment, but not master’s enrollment. The second chapter asks how the economic outcomes of master’s degree recipients vary by characteristics of institutions and fields of study. Using data from the College Scorecard, I find substantial variation in economic outcomes of this most common graduate credential across both institutional characteristics and fields of study. Within a given field, programs in private institutions are associated with greater debt and less advantageous debt-to-income ratios; private non-profit institutions may capitalize on their selectivity at the undergraduate level to justify costly master’s programs that do not ensure high returns. Given the significant variation in outcomes among programs in the same field, the third chapter asks how students choose among many master’s programs in a given field and how their career expectations shape the process of application and program choice. Drawing on interviews with current MBA students, I find that students in lower-ranked programs consider few options and pursue a credential that they hope will confer skills and vertical promotions; students in the most elite programs pursue a credential that they hope will open doors to new career possibilities in exclusive fields. Taken together, this dissertation shows how different family resources, institutional variation, and the stratified process of program choice contribute to unequal access to and outcomes of graduate credentials. While graduate education can promote access to elite occupations and high incomes, my dissertation shows how graduate education is highly stratified.