The three main approaches to educational planning are social demand, manpower forecasting, and cost benefit. The social demand approach, useful only for reference purposes, attempts to forecast and assess consumer demand for education. Manpower forecasting tries to insure an output of the educational system to meet future economic demands, but provides mere approximations for medium-and shortrun goals. The cost-benefit approach, which will be most utilized in the future, attempts to insure either maximization of some objective function, or minimization of resources used to achieve a certain goal. Although sometimes inaccurate, ratios are essential to this approach. These three approaches will be used until replaced by more reliable tools, but in the final analysis the decision-making function for educational resource allocation will remain political. (Author/LLR)