World Yearbook of Education 1967

Educational Planning

George Z. F. Bereday, Joseph A. Lauwerys, Mark Blaug, George Z. F. Bereday, Joseph A. Lauwerys, Mark Blaug

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136168482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

First published in 2005. By focusing on planning this Year Book follows a tradition well established in Comparative Education. This year book hopes that by drawing together into one volume contributions from many distinguished specialists, it hopes to help in the necessary organization and systematization of a field which is full of promise.

SECTION III: THE MANPOWER-REQUIREMENTS APPROACH

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TWO international organizations, UNESCO and OECD, have been foremost in stimulating an interest in educational planning. UNESCO has been chiefly concerned with the under-developed countries; it has devoted most of its energies to the encouragement of regional educational planning in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and its approach has been eclectic and uncommitted to a particular methodology of planning. OECD has confined itself to Europe, and to a lesser extent, to the North American continent, and although preoccupied in the past almost exclusively with the manpower-requirements approach, it is now beginning to be more interested in systems analysis of the educational process. For one reason or another, it proved impossible to obtain a review of UNESCO’s activities from the Educational Planning Division of UNESCO, but part of Phillips’ article (Chapter 23) is in fact devoted to a description of UNESCO’s work. OECD’s approach to educational planning, however, is authoritatively discussed by Gass (Chapter 8). The outstanding contribution of OECD to educational planning is the Mediterranean Regional Project, a long-term educational plan involving six Mediterranean countries. The origins and current status of the MRP are described by its ‘founding father’, Herbert Parnes (Chapter 9). This is followed by a technical evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings of the MRP by Hollister (Chapter 10).

There is no need here to duplicate Parnes’ and Hollister’s explanation of the method that was used in the MRP to forecast manpower requirements. Suffice it to say that the exercise begins with a target figure for the Gross Domestic Product of a country ten or fifteen years hence. This target is laid down in the economic plan of the country and the question that confronts the educational planner is simply this: how many educated people will have to be available over the time-span of the economic plan to realize the target for G.D.P. ? It is immediately apparent that this approach requires central economic planning or, at least, central economic target setting. The work of the educational planner now consists of translating the G.D.P. target into an educational output target. The exercise consists essentially of four steps: (1) the G.D.P. target for the whole economy is broken down into targets for individual sectors, such as manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, etc.; (2) these output targets are now multiplied by a labour-output coefficient, that is, an estimate of the number of workers required to produce one unit of output, resulting in a forecast of the number of workers required to produce the target figure for each sector; (3) the figure for the total number of workers required is now distributed between a number of occupations by means of a particular occupational classification of the labour force; and (4) an estimate is formed of the minimum level of formal education that is required to carry out an occupational task, producing, as an end product, a list of the numbers of people specified by educational attainments that will be necessary to produce the G.D.P. figures in the target year.

It takes very little knowledge of economics to see that every step of the exercise is subject to the problem of accurately predicting future events from past trends or present tendencies. These separate inaccuracies may compound, resulting in enormous errors in the final figures, but, equally likely, they may cancel each other out. The only way to find out which of these two effects make themselves felt is to carry out the exercise and then to wait and see. But when the plan is a fifteen-year plan, few educational planners have the forbearance to wait fifteen years to see whether their forecasts were accurate or not. As Hollister shows, however, it is possible to test the results now for sensitivity to changes in the various coefficients and assumptions employed. His basic conclusions are difficult to summarize. The final figures are, indeed, very sensitive to what one assumes about‘the minimum educational requirements for a job’ (step 4 in the exercise). This is the so-called ‘substitution problem’ that is, the fact that one can usually substitute, say, a cheap ‘technician ’ for an expensive ‘scientist’ without a corresponding loss of output, or else, substitute a machine for a man, dispensing with the job altogether. Furthermore, the final figures are equally sensitive to various predictions about the labour-output coefficient (step 2 in the exercise) and, to a lesser extent, to the particular way one distributes the labour forces between mutually exclusive occupational categories.

Should we conclude that forecasts of manpower requirements are typically so inaccurate or, at any rate, subject to such uncertainty, that the entire approach can be rejected out of hand ? No, say Parnes and Hollister and, as a matter of fact, it is interesting to note that even those authors in this volume who are sceptical of the manpower-requirements approach—Anderson and Bowman (Chapter 1), Miner (Chapter 2), Edding (Chapter 6), DeWitt (Chapter 13), Rado (Chapter 16), Smyth (Chapter 17), and Debeauvais (Chapter 21)—are not prepared to reject it entirely. Parnes offers a sophisticated defence of manpower forecasting, largely an elaboration of the thesis that a little knowledge is better than none. Miner (Chapter 2) and Rado (Chapter 16) seem to take their stand on the lack of any better alternative approach. Anderson and Bowman (Chapter 1) come close to implying that knowledge that is very likely to be erroneous is worse, not better, than ignorance, and that almost any other approach to educational planning would be better than that of forecasting manpower requirements. Clearly, this is an issue we must leave each reader to judge for himself.

At one point in his essay, Parnes distinguishes between ‘ projections ’ and ‘forecasts’ the former referring to the attempt to foresee the conditions that result from the play of spontaneous economic forces, the latter referring to the attempt to spell out the implications of target output figures when economic development is being deliberately manipulated by the State. In this sense, one can speak of manpower forecasting in the Soviet Union, India, or most of the Mediterranean countries, but of manpower projections in the United States, Canada, or Western Germany. France, Britain, Sweden, and The Netherlands are intermediate cases because ‘indicative planning’ depends entirely on hortatory appeals with the power to interfere but without the power to dispense with private initiative. Folger’s essay on the United States (Chapter 12) must be read in the light of Parnes’ distinction. Scientific manpower planning in the United States has not until recently been regarded as the proper function of the central government and it has lacked a coherent philosophy. When practised at all, it has been more concerned with projecting the potential supply of doctors, teachers, scientists, engineers, and technicians, than with projecting the demand for them. Nevertheless, Folger reviews the American experience with ‘manpower projections’, using the technique of extrapolating the percentage of people with various qualifications in the labour force of a particular sector of the economy. Ironically enough, the American method is identical to the Soviet concept of the ‘ ratio of saturation that is, coefficients like the number of scientists per 1,000 wcrkers of all kinds, which have long been used together with ’staffing norms’, that is, the ratio of scientists to engineers or engineers to technicians, to forecast manpower requirements in the U.S.S.R. Folger shows that American manpower supply projections have always erred on the side of under-estimating the supply and that little progress has been made in improving the projections of manpower demands. DeWitt (Chapter 13) describes the increasing pessimism in the Soviet Union about the forecasting of manpower requirements and the renewed interest in some sort of cost-benefit analysis of educational investment as a way out of the dilemma. After perusing DeWitt’s paper, the reader would do well to turn back to Miner (Chapter 2), who claims that a centrally planned economy can afford to practise manpower-forecasting-in-reverse, beginning with a target for manpower and ending up with an implied figure for the Gross Domestic Product.

Further readings in manpower forecasting will be found in Sections IV and V. Rado’s paper (Chapter 16) deserves particular mention: it contains a detailed critical review of the manpower forecasts of three East African countries. Rado argues that East Africa faces a shortage of highly qualified manpower but a surplus of middle and lower level manpower. Furthermore, the shortage of high level manpower is the result, not of economic growth demanding qualified people, but of the desire to ‘Africanize’ managerial and executive positions. In other words, the shortage is a political rather than an economic problem. Nevertheless, standard manpower-forecasting techniques of the MRP type were employed in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania to justify particular educational policies. It is doubtful, however, whether such techniques make sense when one is forecasting, not the manpower that is in some sense required for growth, but simply the manpower one would like to be able to supply. Rado concludes that, at least for the East African countries, the problem of educational planning is how to mobilize education to create new employment opportunities: this is a somewhat different view of the cause-and-effect relationship than that traditionally assumed in the manpower-forecasting approach.

THE EDITORS.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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The Evolution of OECD’s Approach to Educational Planning in Developed Countries

THE work of the OECD in the field of educational planning is to be seen as an inevitable preoccupation of an organization concerned with economic and social development and, in particular, with economic growth. Since the end of World War II, the relatively fast rate of economic growth in the OECD countries, together with the expansion of industries requiring a high proportion of educated manpower, have led to persistent shortages of scientific and technical personnel. It was this chronic and continuing shortage of scientists and engineers which gave rise to the OEEC (and later OECD) programmes in the field of educational planning.

At the outset, therefore, the OEEC focused attention on the problems of forecasting requirements for scientific and technical personnel.¹ However, it was quickly realized that nothing less than a very big overall expansion of education would provide the economies of the member-countries with the required numbers of qualified personnel. Thus, the question which faced the Organization was how both to justify and energize such an expansion.

The Concept of Education as an Investment

For the relationship between the development of the economy and the need for education to be convincingly stated, it was first of all necessary to stimulate academic work on the economics of education and to bring it to the attention of policy makers. The Organization therefore established a Study Group on the Economics of Education to encourage university economists and socia...