Enrollment Forecasting

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Integrated Planning for School and Community (IPSAC) used by the Operations Research and Education Lab (OREd) recognizes that the central feature in almost every study is a system-wide K-12 enrollment forecast. Using standard cohort techniques along with optimal trend-matching tools, OREd will produce short to long-range enrollment forecasts for the entire school district.

Incorporating historical school enrollment figures and available newborn data for the school district, OREd performs cohort survival calculations to project system level enrollment. OREd’s cohort survival method does not rely on an arbitrary choice of years or weights. Instead, it undertakes an empirical search on the enrollment history of each school district and determines the optimal cohort model.

Most importantly OREd conducts comprehensive land use studies to further evaluate and support the most appropriate forecast method.

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This graph illustrates four different forecast approaches varying the level of dependency to the history.

• The most often adopted forecast method is the “4,3,2,1” model which weighs the most recent years more heavily.
• The “1,1,1,1” model produces a forecast that is an average of the previous four year’s growth.
• The “optimal” model does not use arbitrary weighting of historical data, instead it allows an optimization algorithm to search for the weighting that best fits the historical trend.
• The “aggressive” model applies to school districts with an anticipated future growth “spike” that cannot be modeled using traditional methods.

OREd conducts comprehensive land use studies to determine the most appropriate forecast method for the school district.

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