Questionnaires were completed on a single day (spring 1973) by high school seniors from 18 large and small, rural and urban, schools located throughout North Dakota in an effort to establish correlation between desired and expected occupations and expressed educational expectations. Tabular data supported previous studies which established correlation between aspiration and expectation. Male occupational expectation surpassed that of female, while urban student aspiration surpassed that of rural student, and parental occupational prestige was correlated with student occupational/educational expectation. Unexpected sex bias became apparent when females, particularly mothers, exerted more influence on the expectations of daughters than did male figures, and there was a comparable male sex bias. Respondents on the extreme ends of the investigation continuum (i.e., farm and urban residents) were evenly arrayed, while those of intermediate classification were unevenly arrayed. Since North Dakota has an agricultural rather than an industrial base, the response of this study differed from that of a similar study in North Carolina (ED 079 000), though this difference bore out the underlying assumption that socioeconomic factors affect the expectations of high school seniors. (JC)