Models for Projecting School Enrollment

There are a variety of approaches to the problem of forecasting educational enrollment. This paper outlines a structural model for projecting public school enrollment by grade, program, and district. The advantage of specifying a structural model is that many of the standard approaches to forecasting enrollment emerge as special cases of its reduced form equations. The flexibility of this approach also enables a model to be selected that is consistent with the goals of the forecaster and the availability of data. These points are illustrated by an application to the problem of forecasting enrollment in Florida.