Higher Education Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands

W H A T E D U C A T I O N A L P L A N N I N G IS A B O U T

GARETH WILLIAMS

Higher Education Research Unit, London School of Economics, England

ABSTRACT

This editorial introduction to the special issue on planning suggests that much of the early optimism about educational planning has evaporated as a result of the burgeoning costs of higher education and the increasing difficulties graduates are having in finding suitable jobs. It is suggested that the reasons for this disillusion are partly that planners did not take political constraints sufficiently into account, and partly that the education system is far too complex for simplified models to deal with. Instead of treating educational planning as largely an exercise in long-term forecasting, we should be concerned much more with the efficient operation of the system and its orientation in the direction of objectives which are essentially political in nature and which are quite likely to change from one period to the next.

Q. Is the popular assumption about bureaucratic obstructionism a fair one?

A. No, certainly not . . . . I can think of only a few instances. One was the creation of a Planning Branch . . . it was based partly on conser- vatism and partly on administrative argument. The administrative argument was that a Department like Education didn't need a central planning division because the planning function was already being carried out in the separate operating Branches - teacher supply, school building, further education and so on.

Antony Crosland, former British Secretary of State for Education, in The

Politics of Education, Penguin Books, 1971.

P lann ing in e d u c a t i o n , as in a n y t h i n g else, cons is t s essent ia l ly o f

dec id ing in advance w h a t y o u w a n t to do and h o w y o u are going to do it.

To the p ionee r s o f s y s t e m a t i c e d u c a t i o n a l p l ann ing a li t t le over a decade

ago it all s eemed s t r a i g h t f o r w a r d - s imp ly a m a t t e r o f c o n v i n c i n g all

r ea sonab le m e n o f the r a t iona l i t y o f agree ing in advance on e d u c a t i o n a l ob jec t ives and the m e a n s o f i m p l e m e n t i n g t hem. U n f o r t u n a t e l y real i ty is

n o t a lways r ea sonab l e and the o p t i m i s m o f the ear ly 1960s has given way

to an equa l ly i n g e n u o u s pess imism. B o t h v iews have been a m p l y

d o c u m e n t e d but , as the n o d e o f m a n y o f the in te l lec tua l d e v e l o p m e n t s in

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educational planning, it is perhaps appropriate to think of the pendulum swing as being bounded by the OECD Policy Conference on Investment in Education in 1961, and its Educational Growth Conference of 1970. According to the Report of the 1961 Conference:

"The Conference discussions showed agreement that if the authorities responsible for education are to meet the growing demand, they should give attention to the establishment of medium and long-term objectives for university and school enrolments and for the creation of the necessary resources in teachers and buildings. The decisions regarding financing should, wherever possible, be taken within the framework of educational programmes or plans extending over a number of years." (OECD, 1961, p. 12).

By 1970 the OECD's view was that "'in the decade fol- lowing the Washington Conference, there have undoubtedly been advances in the social science base of planning, but, at the same time, an increasing scepticism concerning the adequacy of this base. It is all too easily assumed that the relation between social science and educational planning is directly analagous to that between medicine and health services. In fact, the intervening variables of political interest are too little recognised." (OECD, 1971a, p. 19).

In the one there is the belief that the only need is for planning groups to be set up and politicians and educationalists will immediately see the errors of their ways. In the other there is perhaps not so much pessimism as worldly wisdom.

Obviously developments have not been exactly the same everywhere and exceptions can be found to every generalisation. With this reservation the disappointments of educational planning can be attributed to two main causes. First, planners have not been sufficiently concerned with what Kjell Eide (1971) has called "The Politics of Long Range Planning," second, the technical expertise and the statistical information needed have proved to be greater than was foreseen.

The symptoms of failure have been readily apparent. Educational planners claimed that one of the reasons for expansion of higher educa- tion was the need for greater numbers of highly qualified manpower. We now have - in advanced and developing countries alike - -unemployed and underemployed graduates. Another reason for expansion was that this was the easiest way of achieving equality of opportunity in the educa- tional system itself and in subsequent chances of leading a successful life. In the event all social classes appear to have benefitted from the expansion

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more or less in proportion to their numbers so there has been very little relative increase in the opportunities for deprived social groups.' Finally, educational planners were very reticent about the costs of their pro- grammes, taking the view that "if the nation wills the ends it will also will the means." Now the burgeoning cost of higher education is posing a powerful threat to the other sectors of education and public expenditure generally.

The political inadequacy of educational planners has often been discussed and it is the more important failure. There is little point in educational architects designing an advanced type of school if they can persuade no one to build it. This was, of course, exactly what - according to Crosland's account - the bureaucrats of the British Department of Education feared. And as far as an outside observer can perceive, they proved correct. At least the experiment of a separate Planning Branch seems to have been abandoned. The experience of the United States Office of Education was similar. Many of the bold planning experiments stimulated by the legislation and presidential decrees of the mid-1960s have been discontinued. Even in France - probably the first country in the Western world to attempt systematic long-term educational planning - many of the important decisions which since 1968 have set out to reform the structure of higher education appear to owe little to the work of the planners and much more to political events.

One difficulty is that planning constitutes a threat to the existing power structure. It curtails the freedom of those currently in positions of authority to take decisions in the light of their own judgement. One of the most successful of present planning arrangements, the quinquennial grants system of the British University Grants Committee, does determine - almost exactly - the number of students in each university for a period some five years ahead. The secret of its success is that the individual universities are given the impression that, at least in part, they themselves control the planning process. The threat which planning makes to one's freedom of action can be minimised by controlling or participating in the formulation of the plan. This provides the real justification for par- ticipatory planning, which has more often been advocated on ideological grounds.

What is desirable in the ideological sense can be argued about. What is effective is capable of more objective demonstration. The nature of education, even in those countries with a strong tradition of central administration, is such that there are many effective decision-makers. They include the Minister of Education, bureaucrats of the education

a See for example C. Nam (1971).

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ministry, local government officials, directors of individual educational institutions, teachers and, not least, their students. The proverb, "You can take a horse to water but you can't make him drink" must have special significance to educational planners in all the countries which have created more university places in science than in non-science subjects, only to discover that students preferences lay in the opposite direction - and more recently that employers have shown no particular propensity to employ greatly increased ~umbers of science graduates.

Effective educational planning requires that somehow all the actors be brought on to the stage with a role related to the importance of their function. The principal actors in the higher educational scene are the students who receive it, the teachers whose professional skills provide it, the elected representatives who are directly responsible to the taxpayers for the use of public money, and perhaps the employers who are expected to find jobs for the graduates produced. The function of the remaining panoply of administrators and bureaucrats - national, local and in- stitutional - should be to provide staff support for these principals. The real problem of educational planning so far has been that it has been carried out mainly by these supporting staff (and there usually hived off to isolated groups of technicians), rather than being a central concern of the principals.

A more difficult issue is whether effectiveness is best achieved by attempting to bring all participants into a single Commission or Council in which they can at tempt to hammer out a joint plan. The alternative is a process of bargaining in which each group formulates and tries to implement its own plans independently within the constraints set by the others. Ad hoc agreements may be reached for certain purposes but there is no grand design. The former is favoured by planning technicians; it is nearer and once "The Plan" has been agreed upon, all problems are susceptible to technical solution. On the other hand, the second seems to correspond more nearly to political realities. There can never be any fundamental identity of interests between the students and teachers on one hand, who must want more and more lavishly provided education, and the representatives of the taxpayer, who must want a given amount of education to be provided as cheaply as possible and who require to have demonstrated to them the value to society at large of every item of expenditure. Similarly it is difficult to see how there can be an identity of interests in higher education between academics, who are or should be mainly interested in the intellectual integrity of their discipline, and employers, who are more concerned about its practical relevance. Those who have pretended that such conflicts do not exist or would not exist in an ideal system are simply shutting their eyes to reality.

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Whichever direction the planning process takes, all the principals must have adequate professional research and technical support. Otherwise those who control the information about the system and the technical and professional expertise to manipulate it are in an over- whelmingly powerful position. Again there are two main alternatives. Either each group has its own research and information unit, or a central research unit can be established - financed jointly and responsible to all, but independent of any one of them. This second solution is the one more likely to commend itself to professional planners but again political reality brings dangers. The most difficult is the problem of ensuring adequate control so that the research group does in fact tackle problems that are relevant to practical planning while at the same time being independent enough for its findings to be respected by all the parties involved.

In practice, planning is probably more likely to be effective if each power group involved has its own research and statistics group. In addition to its concern with the overall planning operation, each has its own internal planning operations and these are more likely to be carried out efficiently if performed by the same people as are involved in the national planning operation. This is the main justification for the institutional

planning groups that are already established in many universities in the United States and on a smaller scale in Europe. Such groups should be concerned partly with the operation of the nation-wide system of higher education and, in the light of this, with resource allocation within the institution. Similarly students' and teachers' unions need to have their own research and planning support.

It is still doubtful, however, if such a system of checks and balances can adequately reflect the general interest without some more systematic coordination, and the experiment of a National Educational Council with representatives from all interest groups currently being established in the Federal Republic of Germany may be a pattern for others to follow.

So much for the structure of educational planning: what of the techniques? The first point to make is that until very recently, educational planning was almost synonymous with long-term projections of one sort or another. The development of techniques - or as many of its practi- tioners prefer to call them, the methodologies of educational planning - has been rapid. From the simple projection exercises of the early 1960s we have progressed through the Moser-Redfern-Stone family of models (1965) and the Thonstad-Koenig-von Weizsacker-Armitage-Smith-Alper refinements (1966-68) . Now the proliferation is so great in so many centres that ment ion of individual authors is impossible. 2 Most of these projection

2 Several bibliographies of educational planning try to keep pace with the burgeoning output; one of the best known is Blaug (1970).

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models have been concerned with what has been loosely called the "social demand" for higher education - which means attempting to forecast the claims for places by individual students at whatever price is currently charged. Broadly, all have taken as a starting point the criterion succintly expressed by the British Robbins Committee that "courses of higher education should be available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so."

There have been similar developments in the other general approach to planning higher education based on the assumption that the main criterion should be the employment prospects for graduates. The cor- responding criterion for this approach would be that "courses should be available for all who are likely to obtain subsequent remunerative employ- ment as a result of attending the course." Here one line of progression has been from Parnes (1962), Bombach (1964) and Tinbergen, Correa and Bos (1964) to the programming models of Benard and others. Simultaneously the "human capital" approach has been developed largely in the United States, arising from the early work of Schultz (1959)and Becker (1964). Latterly it has spread to Europe and has found expression in some of the work of Blaug (1965). Here too proliferation is now so great as to preclude mention of names. These parallel developments of "manpower planning" on one hand and "rate of return" analysis on the other have been associated with a lively intellectual dispute about the nature of the contribution of educated manpower to the national economy and the validity of the concept of human capital. It has some similarity with a much more profound debate amongst economists about the nature of capital. 3

At the practical planning level three main positions have been adopted arising out of the empirical observations that rich countries usually have more educated people than poor countries, and that on average educated people earn more than uneducated people. The first interpretation of this evidence was that education causes the higher incomes by increasing general productivity which is reflected in higher earnings. The planning implications are that where earnings associated with a particular qualification are particularly high in relation to the costs of providing that qualification, its provision should be expanded. The second view is that different types of education provide people with specific skills required by a modern economy, and planning consists of forecasting the rate of growth of requirements of these separate skills and gearing the educational system to supplying them. The third possibility is

3 For an account of the debate see G. C. Harcourt (1972). Its relevance to the human capital concept is considered in J. Vaizey (1972).

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that education is a consumption good on which countries prefer to spend a higher proportion of their incomes as they get richer. The higher income of educated individuals is not because they are more socially productive but is the result of a purely distributive effect in favour of the educated. They are preferred by employers for a variety of social, cultural and psychological reasons. Planning in this case consists of predicting the demand for education by individuals and deciding on general political grounds-usually those of equ i ty -how it should be subsidized.

All of these planning approaches have been carried to a high degree of sophistication, and elaborate mathematical models developed for each. None has proved very. successful in practice.

Papers presented to the OECD Growth Conference in 1970 showed wide discrepancies between plans based on social demand forecasts and outcomes in many countries of Western Europe and the United States. Ahamad and Blaug (1972) monitor the failure of about a dozen national attempts at manpower planning in terms of a comparison of forecasts with outcomes. Recent empirical work - such as that in OECD (t971b) and Layard et al. (1971) - cast doubt on any belief in fixed relationships between the use of qualified manpower and any important economic variables. And overshadowing all have been the spectres of graduate unemployment , the failure of expansion to achieve anything like social equality, exploding costs and discontented students.

The response of many planners has been to construct ever more elaborate models requiring more and more statistical information for satisfactory validation. The words "systems analysis" were briefly in vogue, which now seems to be passing. There are grounds for supposing, however, that there may be limits to our educational model building, and our possible knowledge about the educational system - limits analogous to these regions of outer space about which human beings can never know because they are receding faster than any radio waves can travel.

A concrete example can perhaps make the point. A not unreasonable hypothesis is that in taking their decisions about whether to enter higher education and which subjects to study, school-leavers are influenced by their perceptions of future salaries of graduates with different qualifica- tions. If, therefore, we are to predict the demand by students for places we must predict first how relative salaries will change with different outputs of various kinds of graduates, then estimate how changes in actual salaries affect perceptions of salaries, and finally the extent of the response of students to a specified change in perceived salaries. Each of these steps involves a system of complex lagged responses. The first, for example, requires estimates of relationships between use of qualified manpower and other factors of production and rates of change in the availability of these

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other factors. 4 The amount of data required to get estimates of these parameters reliable enough for long-term forecasting is considerable, but more importantly, is required for long periods of time. However, over long periods there are many reasons to suppose that the values of the para- meters themselves change, as technology changes and as behaviour changes. And this is only one, possibly minor, influence on decisions about entry to higher education. Whea we start to consider how we should d.eal with non-economic factors such as the influence of peer goups , of teachers, and intrinsic interest in the subject, we begin to glimpse the magnitude of the problems involved in long-term planning in the sense in which it has been perceived hitherto, s

This is not to deny that research into the kind of topic mentioned above is desirable. It is, but not for long-term planning. The aim of research should be to improve current operation of the system - not to try to provide a telescope for peering long distances into a murky future.

Still less is it being maintained that there should be no long-term planning of higher education. Universities once built have a habit of lasting for centuries; teachers once trained are there for decades. What is misguided is to at tempt to obtain a precise and accurate picture of the future more than a year or two ahead. Broad political and social orienta- tions must be established by all concerned in the provision of education, but these will have no particular scientific basis, - especially as ends and means in education are more than normally interrelated. However, projec- tions can be made which will give an indication of the path to set out on in order to move in the direction of the objectives. By the following year the projections will probably prove to have been wrong or the desired direction itself may have changed. This is harmless provided that the machinery exists to monitor accurately developments in the real system, to up-date the projections and base new decisions on the difference between the old and new projections and to implement them; or perhaps to make new projections in the light of the changed objectives. One year's decisions do no lasting damage to a system as education providing that they can be reversed if necessaD, during the following year.

But this kind of flexible apparatus requires a very different concept of planning from that most people have had so far. To date most plans

4 Some of these calculations can be made, as they are in Richard Freeman (1971), reviewed in this issue. But Freeman does not attempt to link all his findings together in a single planning model. s After writing this piece I was intrigued to discover that there are analagous diffi- culties in quantifying judgements in many areas of Science Policy (see Weinberg (1972).

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have been single shot efforts and often considerable expertise has been put into them to make them as intellectually respectable as possible. But just because such efforts are made it is extremely difficult to revise the plan; it remains the basis of decisions until a new plan is made, often 5 or even 10 years later. Meanwhile the plan acts as a constraint rather than a stimulus to reform and innovation. The research workers associated with the plan sit in their offices trying to improve their techniques and methodologies so that "next time we do better." But this is the whole problem. In an efficient planning process there should be no question of last time and next time; there is a continuous flow of information from the system through the planners to the policy groups and from the policy groups through the administrators back to the system.

This is the direction in which, however slowly, we are moving. Academics involved in the planning process can do their part to help by concerning themselves less with the techniques of educational planning mad more with the problems, less with being right in the eyes of their academic colleagues and more with influencing policy in the right direc- tion. In this, paradoxically, they may well do more to advance their subject than by adopting a purist approach. In the social sciences generally progress has usually come through a concern with problems in the real world and not from academic attempts to develop technique. In educa- tional planning as elsewhere technique should be the servant, not the master, of policy. It is with this in mind that this special planning issue of Higher Education has been compiled.

References

Ahamad, B. and Blaug, M. (1972). The Practice of Manpower Forecasting. Amster- dam: Elsevier Publishing Company.

Armitage, P.; Smith, C. and Alper, P. (1969). Decision Models for Educational Planning. Alien Lane The Penguin Press.

Becker, G. (1964). Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. Princeton University Press.

Benard, J. (1967). "General Optimization Model for the Economy and Education," Mathematical Models in Educational Planning. OECD.

Blaug, M. (1965). "The Rate of Return to Investment in Education in Great Britain," Manchester School.

Blaug, M. (1970). Economics o f Education A Selected Annotated Bibliography. (2rid edition). Pergamon Press.

Bombach, G. (1964). "Long Term Requirements for Qualified Manpower in Relation to Economic Growth," in Harris, Seymour, ed., Economic Aspects o f Higher Education. OECD.

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Eide, K. (1971). "The Politics of Long Range Planning," in Green, T.H., ed., Educational Planning in Perspective. International Printing Corporation.

Freeman, R. (1971). The Market for College Trained Manpower. Harvard University Press.

Harcourt, G. C. (1972). Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital. Cambridge University Press.

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Kogan, M., ed. (1971). The Politics of Education. Penguin Books. Layard, P. R. G.; Sargan, D.; Ager, M. and Jones, D. (1971). Qualified Manpower and

Economic Performance. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Moser, C. A. and Redfern, P. (1965). "Education and Manpower: Some Current

Research," Models for Decision. English Universities Press. Nam, C. (1971 ). Group Disparities in Educational Participation. OECD. OECD (1961). Policy Conference on Economic Growth and Investment in Education. OECD (1971 a). Educational Policies for the 19 70s. OECD (1971b). Occupational and Educational Structures of the Labour Force and

Levels of Economic Development. Parnes, H. C. (1962). Forecasting Educational Needs for Economic and Social

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tional Comparison. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company. Schultz, T. (1959). "Investment in Man: An Economist's View," Social Science

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Bedarfschatzung," Bildungsokonomie eine Zwischenbilanz (Economics of Education in Transition). Ernst Klett Verlag.

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