The number of students needed for undecided programs at a college from the supply-chain viewpoint

Abstract

The objective of this study is to determine how to do forward-looking analysis to determine the future need for various professionals, so that educational institutes can produce an appropriate labor force for national development. The concept of component part commonality, which derives from research on effective inventory management using material resource planning (MRP), can also be applied to human resource planning and educational resource management in higher education systems. Therefore, this paper proposed a systematic method to analyze student recruitment numbers for future needs, based on the concept of MRP. The research studied the relationship between a curricular structure tree and the associated commonalities. It explored the relationship between the commonality of students and the aggregated level of student replenishment. Based on that, systematic guidelines for curriculum design can be established for undeclared programs at collages. Two simple examples were used to illustrate the implementation of MRP in analysis of the replenishment levels (necessary safety stock levels) in an education system such as an engineering college. © 2012 Jin-Ling Lin et al.