Special Feature

Japan's Universities and the Current Climate for Reform

Charles Jannuzi and Bern Mulvey
October 2002

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Meritocracy ill-served
Japan's university system, once a source of pride because of its service to national meritocracy, has in recent years found itself the subject of relentless scrutiny and criticism. Among 49 economies surveyed in 2001 with regard to meeting the needs of its economy, Japan's university education system embarassingly ranked last. Academics and pundits have repeatedly excoriated the system as being overly hierarchical and paternalistic to such an extent that the independence and creativity of both the professors and the students are squelched. The work of Nobel laureates Hideki Shirakawa and Ryoji Noyori came about not as a result of a government-sponsored research project but from individual research largely ignored by the system. It's understandable, then, why Japan's few Nobel Prize winners and many of its leading scholars choose to continue their careers overseas.

Until the early 1990s, because the numbers of high school graduates had always exceeded university admissions slots, matriculation was a reason for celebration. Despite the view that a university education was a four-year vacation from working life, graduation with marginal grades from even the middling universities conferred sufficient cachet to ensure recruitment into lifetime employment. That is no longer the case. High school enrollments continue to go down, forcing many universities and colleges to compete as never before for fewer and fewer new students. Lifetime employment after graduation, never guaranteed for women or workers at the thousands of smaller companies anyway, isn't even a serious point of discussion for today's university-leaving job-seekers.

After more than a decade of an overvalued currency and the consequent weak economic performance, related political turmoil, and reform overshoot, more and more Japanese express a loss of faith in old institutions and ways of doing things. There is largely a consensus, though, that there must be reform, though consensus is lacking on what that systematic change should consist of, how it should be carried out, or who should bear the brunt of the immediate consequences. Typical of societies with developed economies and large middle classes, publicly subsidized education has become a major focus of reform, though consistency and coherence of vision is a problem Japan shares with the rest of the developed world.

Urgent goals
Some of the goals of reform being imposed on the national university system (where most university-based research takes place) are felt to be urgent, necessary, and a key component of Prime Minister Koizumi's reform administration. They include the following.

(1) Saving the debt-ridden national government money, a priority made even more urgent by government debt approaching 150% of GDP even while tax revenues continue to fall. This will most obviously be done by eliminating and combining programs, college-/school-level divisions, and even entire universities.

(2) Launching the universities into local self-governance with strict fiscal accountability to the centre. Once independent, these institutions may well have to compete for funding among themselves or with other public and private universities. In fact, private universities support the reform of national universities because they hope such changes to the system will free up more public subsidy to go their way. However, given the current fiscal problems facing the national and local governments, it seems that in the long term, the situation will be many more universities competing for a declining pool of national money. Clearly, universities that hope to survive, regardless of their original foundation (national, public or private), will have to find alternative sources of funding and endowment.

(3) Enlivening teaching through effective evaluation of teachers' performance and curriculum development. Many Japanese educators contend that Japanese universities do not foster creativity or flexible approaches to problem-solving in their students, and teacher-centred lectures are often cited as one of the main reasons.

(4) Through competitive tenure, making the institutions more internationally competitive in scientific and technological research. As already stated, one goal is to take the many small universities and combine them into larger, more cost-efficient operations. It is also hoped that this will result in synergies in basic and applied research that will create at least a handful of world-class universities among the few that will remain. Another reform that is already having an effect is the change in the civil servant status of national university professors, scientists and medical doctors which allows them to form research and business tie-ups with the private sector.

In order to sever the bonds between the national government and its 98 universities, it has been first necessary for reform proponents and their supporters to change the fundamental laws and regulations governing education--a process that is not yet finished. However, so far the actual realization of educational reform policies has been slowed up by prolonged instability in Japan's prime minister post. Now, under the current government, it seems quite likely that the national universities will see serious implementation of reforms down to a workaday level.

One change made already allows researchers at national universities to serve as advisors and board members of companies in order to promote cooperative research and business income from that research. If the UK precedent applies, however, it would be naive to expect immediate, dramatic results from most university-industry tie ups in research and business.

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