Towards a Management Science Perspective for Recurrent Education

Many models to aid decision-taking in education of a strategic nature have been put forward in the literature, but there has been little response from educational administrators. In order to pinpoint the reasons for this, a revolutionary concept, recurrent education, is examined in detail. The beginnings of a mathematical programming model applicable to this concept are presented. It appears from this study that the problems of planning education are connected with: setting objectives; defining input-output relationship, which is essentially uncertain in nature; measuring achievements on often long-time scales; handling multiple objectives and defining them in an operational form; including stochastic aspects of educational processes.