SUMMARYEducational planners and administrators face the problems of distributing re‐sources between general and vocational education. A model is presented to help them in this decision.The main differences between general and vocational education is the probability of its being put to practical use. In the particular case where vocational education is the preparation for a specific job, the probability that it will be used is equal to one. The probability that the subjects taught in general education will be used is less than one. Thus, to compare the yields of general and vocational education the expected values of their yields should be used.The yields of general and vocational education are not the only factors that should be considered in distributing resources among them. The influence of the cost of the two types of education and the resources available should also be included.The expected yields, the costs and resources available for education are put together in a linear programming problem. The solution of the problem indicates that resources should be spent on the type of education that yields more per unit of cost.To avoid some of the limitations of the linear problem, a quadratic version is also considered.The main direction for progress suggested by the paper is in the recompilation of quantitative data on the yields, and costs of the two types of education, as well as for the probabilities of their use. Additional research on the probability distribution of the use of subjects taught in the schools is also suggeste