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Higher education in the United States and elsewhere is beset by crises: crises of public confidence, questions of continuing relevance, doubts about continuing the emphasis on doctoral instruction, and a very real financial crisis. In response, governing boards and governmental agencies are devoting increasing attention to the management of higher education. Part of this response has been a heightened interest in formal planning-programming-budgeting-systems (PPBS); in fact, several states have legislated the adoption of PPBS for higher educational planning and decision making. Similar interest has been evidenced in other countries. Therefore, it is an appropriate time to reconsider the nature and role of PPBS and its potential impact on higher education. This paper describes the salient characteristics of PPBS and traces the development of PPBS and related analytical techniques in governmental agencies and institutions of higher education. A second paper will illustrate both the concepts and the implementation of PPBS by a detailed exposition of the University of California's experience with PPBS. Finally, in a third paper we suggest an alternative view of policy analysis for educational planning which is a departure from traditional PPBS. We conclude with general observations and specific recommendations to educational managers seeking to improve their resource allocation procedures.

Part: I provided an overview of PPBS, some discussion of PPBS implementation in the U.S. government, and a review of the arguments for adopting PPBS in postsecondary education and the various kinds of work that have been done toward this end."In part II, we discuss the experience of the University of California with PPBS from 1966 to 1971. Part III, to be published subsequently, will suggest some new departures in model construction and policy analysis which we believe represent a useful spirit in which further development can and should occur, and will also contain some general concluding observations.

This is the concluding part of a three-part series on "Planning, Program, Budgeting Systems" (PPBS) in higher education planning and management. After the experiences of the University of California with PPBS, which we reviewed in Part II, and the subsequent lack of success of PPBS in non-defense applications, we believe a more carefully focused policy analysis approach to be more fruitful. In this paper we describe the nature, foci, and analytical base for policy analysis and present a case study of policy analysis applied to the decision of year-round operations for the University of California. Finally, we give some concluding comments and observations.