Summary of Educational Planning and Economic Growth

An economy with scarce resources and enormous needs and aspirations requires planning. This is true of the education sector also. Educational planning facilitates an economy in boosting the efficiency of educational expenditures and helps in the provision of meaningful (to the market) and relevant education which ultimately contributes to higher level of economic growth. There are several approaches to educational planning, each of them having its own merits and limitations. For instance, while manpower planning would be highly useful for a macro-economy, cost-benefit studies would be useful to compare the relative merits of individual educational courses/levels.

Production or growth is a function of interaction of a variety of variables that contribute to growth. A model that examines, explains, assesses and predicts the relative differentials in values/contributions of variables to economic growth is a Production Function Model. This model was used by leading economists of the world such as Edward F Denison, Theodore W Schultz, Gary S Becker and D. W.Jorgensen to measure the contribution of education to economic growth in the United States for different periods of time.

While Cost-Benefit studies in education are quite useful and relevant in a market economy, manpower studies would be most effective in centralised economies. As techniques of understanding for educational planning, both of them are useful in a mixed economy.

There are five well known techniques of manpower forecasting. These are:

(a) Rule of Thumb Method,

(b) Employers’ Estimates,

(c) International Comparison Technique,

(d) Manpower Population Ratios, and

(e) MRP Technique.

Of all of them, MRP technique is most sophisticated. Input-output models are used in economics of education in studies of cost-quality and education-labour-earnings relationships.