to white collar employment in this coun try. Yet, the expansion of higher education access and degree attainment has created greater expectations for upward mobil ity than the job market can bear (Anyon, 2005; Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Lafer, 2002; Nasaw, 1979). In the last decades, institu tions of higher education have consis tently produced a greater supply of college graduates than available middle class jobs. As the number of college graduates has outpaced careers requiring college level skills, many college graduates end up performing work for which only a high school education is necessary. Increasing numbers of college graduates not only work beneath their educational qualifica tions, but many of those with a bachelor s By Emily Schnee degree earn close to the minimum wage (Levin-Waldman, 1999 cited in Anyon). Hence, the contradiction of unfulfilled expectations is a more widespread phe nomenon than popularly believed (Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Clark, 1960). Using the unfulfilled mobility aspira tions of adult students in a union-sup ported college worker education program (WEP) as a lens, this article aims to explore the tension between education for mobility and education for transformation. While working class students often come to higher education in pursuit of social and economic mobility, radical educa tors, like many who teach at WEP, aspire to teach for critical consciousness and social transformation. The space between these seemingly opposed intentions can be fraught with frustrations on both sides. I argue that honest and explicit consider ation of the disparity between students' mobility desires and their realistic pros pects for class mobility as a result of their degrees could heighten students' critical consciousness and increase the transfor mative potential of the worker education program. Furthermore, I posit that deeper explo ration of students' mobility aspirations reveals that these desires are more complex and nuanced than faculty may assume. Rather than a simplistic vision of higher education as fostering individual eco nomic mobility, WEP students' mobil ity desires spanned a broad spectrum of ideologies and intentions. Students sought mobility for themselves, their fam ilies, the advancement of their racial and ethnic communities, and for pursuit of socially transformative work. While the worker education programs' urban and labor studies curricula and progressive pedagogy intersected with students' lived