The State Planning System (SPS) is a flexible, policy-oriented management tool intended to help analyze possible impacts of various policy decisions. The SPS is able to address a wide range of issues because it depends on the user to provide the relationships and data to be used in the analysis. Such issues might include enrollment shifts among…

Practices in needs assessment are reviewed since 1981, the year the federal government changed the role it plays in promoting needs assessment in the public sector. The review is based on reports published to 1993 and indicates that needs assessment is flourishing in a variety of settings. (SLD)

This paper analyzes planning at Red River College in Manitoba. The paper suggests that the decision-making process be effectively linked with analytics. The fundamental role of institutional research and planning in postsecondary education is to provide the analytic and planning inputs that can facilitate decision-making. It is necessary to…

This background paper on refugee needs assessment discusses the assumptions, goals, objectives, strategies, models, and methods that the state refugee programs can consider in designing their strategies for assessing the mental health needs of refugees. It begins with a set of background assumptions about the ethnic profile of recent refugee…

Recent applications of the strategic planning approach in colleges and universities and techniques necessary for its application are reviewed. In addition, the intellectual roots of strategic planning are traced, and strategic planning is defined and contrasted with long-range planning. It is suggested that strategic planning addresses the total…