Manpower targets and educational investments (original) (raw)

Quadratic programming can be useful to compute the optimal investment trajectory for an education system which is planned on the base of manpower targets. The computation of optimal investments required to approach manpower targets more closely becomes non trivial if the budget available is insufficient to meet manpower targets exactly, or if the manpower target trajectory is erratic. The quadratic programming problem consists of three components: (1) an optimization criterion which reflects the objective to minimize the squared deviation of actual manpower available from the manpower target; (2) a set of time difference equations which reflect the flow of students, the manpower stock flow and the flow of investments in the education subsystem: (3) a constraint on the budget, available for this branch of education over a planning period. This education investment problem is worked out for middle level technical manpower training in Bangladesh.