ABSTRACT
This paper is occasioned by personal experience with educational planning problems in East Africa, 1 and in particular by the realization of some of the theoretical and practical difficulties in what is generally understood to-day as the ‘manpower approach’ to educational planning. The paper is in four parts: (1) a critical examination of what is perhaps the most significant of the ‘fixed coefficient’ approaches to manpower problems to appear in recent years—the Tinbergen regressions, (2) a defence of rate-of-return analysis as an essential and integral part of educational planning, (3) an attempt to estimate the returns on investment in education in Uganda, and (4) an indication of how these estimates modify conventional wisdom regarding the appropriate development of education in Uganda or East Africa.
