An Investment Analysis of Vocational Programs Offered in Missouri Junior Colleges
Administrators of the public junior colleges in Missouri are faced with two major problems. First, there is an increasing number of students demanding post-secondary education. Second, apathy of voters and legislators toward financial support of our educational institutions is increasing. A study entitled Missouri Public Junior Colleges: A Report to the People revealed that in 1960 there were approximately 600,000 students enrolled in two-year institutions of higher education in the United States. The report further stated that in 1971 the enrollments would climb to 2,000,000 and that by 1980 the projected enrollments would approximate 4.4 million. This predicted growth pattern has been observed in Missouri with the enrollments increasing by approximately 20 percent per year. The report cited above also confirms the second major problem as state aid for Missouri junior colleges has been decreasing over the past few years. Voter apathy, although more evident in secondary schools, is a force that can affect the junior college as programs are expanded to meet the increasing student demand.
A Predictive Model for Manpower Requirements in Georgia Agriculture
Persistently high levels of unemployment among unskilled workers, as well as college graduates, have focused attention on manpower problems. High levels of unemployment may result from a deficiency of aggregate demand or from structural maladjustments in the manpower market. The latter problems generally emanate from changing technological patterns and shifts in the pattern of economic growth. While there are many socio-economic issues involved, it is generally recognized that problems of structural adjustment can be satisfactorily managed, in time, if a sufficiently high level of aggregate demand is maintained. Therefore, an initial concern in manpower planning is to accurately relate manpower requirements by occupation and level of education to anticipated levels of aggregate demand.
Total and Private Rates of Return to Investment in Schooling
-y W9HE costs of schooling and the money returns resulting from investment in schooling are currently receiving more and more attention by economists, not only because of their possible implications for economic growth, but also because they may help individuals to determine how much they should invest in the development of their own human capital. This note provides some further evidence on these two topics; it presents estimates of internal rates of return based on both total and private resource costs for various amounts of schooling, from elementary school through college. The fragmentary treatment of both the costs of schooling and the money returns to schooling found in much of the recent literature provided the stimulus for preparing these internal rate-of-return estimates. For example, Miller calculates life-time income values by level of schooling,2 Houthakker estimates, on the basis of alternative discount rates, the present value of income streams associated with different levels of schooling,3 Schultz provides estimates of total resource costs of education by broad level of schooling,4 and Becker and Schultz calculate for several levels of education the expected rates of return, sometimes on a total resource cost basis and at other times on a private resource cost basis.5 Given this diversity of treatment, it is difficult to obtain an over-all picture of the relationship among rates of return to different amounts of schooling or to see the nature of the differences between the rates of return as viewed by society and those viewed by individuals. Moreover, the relationship among the various methods of contrasting the economic gains from education-the lifetime income, the present value, and the rate of return comparisons-has been obscured. It becomes important to understand what some of these relationships are when society and individuals allocate such a large portion of their resources to schooling. At the societal level, for example, we might be interested in determining whether to allocate more funds to reduce the number of dropouts from high school or to stimulate an increased flow