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.
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Williams, G. What educational planning is about. High Educ 1, 381–390 (1972). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136800
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136800