Social Demand Models

Publisher Summary This chapter explains the social demand models. Social demand refers to the demand for education emerging from the needs and aspirations of individual persons as contrasted to educational demand based on the personnel requirements of society. It is difficult to find indicators of social demand that are not influenced by the supply of educational facilities. This is true not only for enrollment statistics in a situation of restricted admission but also for distributions of choices and applications when such information is available. Social demand is an important variable in educational planning at the stages where alternative pathways through the educational system are provided, that is, mainly in secondary and higher education. Social demand is the aggregated result of individual decisions in educational choice situations. Every individual decision can be seen as a compromise between preferences for and expectancies of a certain education. The individual's preferences and expectancies depend on both immediate and distant determinants in the choice situation. Educational systems are often conceptualized in two dimensions. The vertical dimension stands for length and level of education, the horizontal dimension for type or sector of education.