K-12 enrollment forecasting: merging methods and judgment.

"This article describes an enrollment forecasting process in which technical experts and local community stakeholders [in Oregon] worked together to produce data that were cost-efficient and yet accurate enough to serve as the basis for sound decisions. The large school district that employed this process gained valuable insights to guide its attendance zone and facilities planning decisions, and also created a group of key communicators to ensure community understanding and support."

Improving the accuracy of intercensal estimates and postcensal projections of the civilian noninstitutional population: a parameterization of institutional prevalence rates.

The authors first note that current official U.S. population estimates and projections are based on the assumption that certain characteristics of the institutionalized population remain constant between censuses. The article "examines the empirical validity of this assumption by using data from the decennial censuses for 1940-1980 and, in light of substantial decade to decade changes in the age patterns of the institutional proportions for sex- and race-specific populations, seeks to develop alternative methods." As part of these alternative methods, "parametric curves are fit to the age-specific institutional proportions for each population for each decade. A study of the observed historical variation in the parameters of these curves then leads to some suggestions about how their shapes can be estimated between censuses and projected beyond the latest available census to provide more accurate estimates and projections of the civilian noninstitutional population." This is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Population Association of America (see Population Index, Vol. 50, No. 3, Fall 1984, p. 439).

New midyear age-sex-color-specific estimates of the U.S. population for the 1940s and 1950s: including a revision of coverage estimates for the 1940 and 1950 censuses.

This paper describes new midyear (July 1) estimates of the "true" population of the United States by age, sex, and color (white, nonwhite) for the 1940s and 1950s. It also presents the corresponding implied coverage estimates for the 1940 and 1950 censuses. The new population estimates are calculated by combining the most recent figures on the 1960 population with estimates of the demographic components of change for the 1950s and 1940s in an iterative reverse cohort-component projection algorithm. Among the principal findings of the new estimates are: (a) existing midyear estimates of the "true" population in the 1950s are 450,000 to 500,000 too high; (b) existing age-specific estimates for the 1950s tend to underestimate the population at the older ages (55 years and over) and overestimate the population in the young and middle adult years (15 to 54 years); (c) estimates of the "true" population in the 1940s were too low except for nonwhites at ages 65 and over; (d) existing estimates of percentage net undercount and underenumeration for the 1950 and 1940 censuses tend to be too high, substantially so for nonwhites in the 1940 Census; and (e) nonwhites were more completely enumerated in 1940 than in 1950. Thus, in addition to being methodologically and temporally consistent with post-1960 estimates, the new population estimates described here imply some substantial revisions in demographic, social, and economic statistics for the two decades prior to 1960.