README.TXT for HEEDS
by Ricolindo L Carino, PhD (E-mail: Ricolindo.Carino@AcademicForecasts.com)


HEEDS abbreviates "Higher Education Enrollment Decision Support". This 
program is designed to support enrollment planning in Higher Educational 
Institutions. It was built and tested for state universities and colleges
in the Philippines. 

"Enrollment" is what students do during the start of a semester. During
this time, a student: 
  1). selects the subjects to enroll, and 
  2). selects non-conflicting classes for those subjects.
When the above selections are fixed, the student pays the required fees, 
and is considered officially enrolled for the semester.

"Enrollment planning" is what university administrators do shortly after 
the start of classes, to prepare for the enrollment of students in the 
NEXT semester. The crucial decision to be made by administrators are:
  A). Which subjects to offer next semester; and,
  B). How many classes to open for each subject.
  
Thus, administrators need a "crystal ball" to see three to four months
ahead in the future: what subjects will be needed, and how many students 
will need each subject.

HEEDS mimics the "crystal ball" to provide predictions that may be
useful for university administrators. HEEDS utilizes a computational 
modeling and simulation approach to predict the subjects to be enrolled
by a student. A simple count of how many students are predicted to
enroll a subject provides the demand for the subject. This demand
translates into the number of classes to open for the subject. The
number of classes for each subject offered by an academic department
translates into the estimated teaching load of the department. A comparison
of the estimated teaching loads of departments provides quantitative insight 
in determining which departments require additional manpower, or which 
departments can "lend" their faculty to other departments.

In addition to predicting the subjects to be enrolled by each student, 
HEEDS may also be used to pre-enlist students into non-conflicting 
classes for those subjects. This pre-enlistment may be accepted as-is
or modified by students during the actual enrollment period. 

Thus, HEEDS pictures a possible outcome of the enrollment of the next 
semester, a few months before it actually occurs.