This conference on economic issues in vocational education was the product of a number of considerations such as the increased interest in problems of the disadvantaged, the increased emphasis on vocational education by the federal government, and the increased emphasis on training and retraining as solutions to at least a part of the unemployment problem. With this background the expectations of the conference were to provide for: (1) a group of persons (chiefly economists) engaged in evaluative research in the vocational education area to be exposed to the concerns, attitudes, and views of vocational educators, and (2) a group of educators concerned with their mission, interested in evaluation, and hopeful of increasing the effectiveness of their efforts to better understand what the economist means by evaluation, the criteria he relies on, the framework he utilizes, and the data he requires. Topics on which presentations were made include occupational guidance, labor-market implications, evaluation studies, and occupational training needs. (CH)