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The Japanese higher education sector has seen increases in tuition with stagnant household incomes in a society where family support for university students has been the norm. Student loans from the government have grown rapidly to sustain the gradual increase in university enrolments. These time-based repayment loans (TBRLs) have created financial hardship for increasing numbers of loan recipients and their families. There is some evidence that prospective students from low-income households are forgoing a university education to avoid student loan debt. The Japanese government has introduced some measures including grants and a partial income-contingent loan (ICL) scheme to help alleviate these problems. While the ICL scheme is a positive development, this paper shows that it requires further refinement and broader coverage if it is to adequately address the challenges facing higher education financing in Japan. We show that an affordable and universal ICL system could be introduced in Japan that avoids problems with the current partial income-contingent loan scheme and would help alleviate access issues for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Importantly, the unique features of the Japanese labor market have to be carefully considered, especially the large gender wage gap for married women. By introducing dynamics into modeling graduate earnings and using carefully selected parameters, we show that it is possible to have a universal ICL which achieves a balance between access and affordable repayment with minimal long-run costs to taxpayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the process and meaning of problem-based learning (PBL) that students may experience. The Project Cycle Management method was taught and utilised as an instrument of PBL at a Japanese women's college over a period of 5 years. The study closely examined what and how students learned in PBL from the perspectives of cognitive, social, and internal aspects. Despite the relative ignorance about the internal aspect of learners in previous research, the results of the study revealed that the internal aspect is inseparably linked with the other two aspects, and the three of them simultaneously undergo their own changes in the PBL process. That is, meaningful learning experiences seem to be no less importantly affected by the feelings or internal aspect of learners than by cognitive and social counterparts. Then, beyond knowledge building and skill acquirement, PBL may have contributed to broadening learners' perspectives and promoting their personal development. In this regard, PBL can be defined anew, from an angle different from that of previous research, as learning that can generate rich and varied emotions in learners concurrently as they face problems, enable them to acquire subject matter knowledge and relational skills through dialogue, and eventually guide them to the threshold of personal transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The era of Asia has been felt in foreign language education in Japan, with more and more youth reportedly opting to study Chinese and Korean as the second foreign language. The shift in popularity, from European to Asian languages, not only reflects the societal demand for the institutional rearrangement of academic staff but also stirs teachers of European languages to appeal for the continued study of their language. The present discussion paper, drawing from secondary statistics and scholarly knowledge, first reviews a series of Japan's foreign language education policies from the 1990s to 2012 that have been affecting the organizational structure of foreign language education in Japanese higher education. The study then addresses an array of issues that emerge with the changing needs of the times: the waning popularity of European languages, the Japanese government's policy shift to English and Chinese, English language professionals' detached attitudes toward other language education, and the dominance of university language teachers with little to no language teaching training. By addressing these pending yet gravely overlooked issues that merit due attention from language teaching professionals beyond Japan, the present study hopes to provide insight into the traditionally one-sided, English-centric discussion on foreign language education in Japanese higher education in a matter that is informative for international scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at investigating Japanese government’s subsidy policy for private universities by applying statistical approaches to various types of quantitative data. Firstly, we briefly describe the history of the government subsidy policy to identify the dominant factors behind it and also explain the structure and mechanism of this subsidy. Secondly, by using 2005 data, we try to find influential factors in allocating both general subsidies and special subsidies for private universities. Thirdly, using the data in two periods given as 1975–1979 and 2000–2004, we try to elucidate the structural properties of the subsidy policy by applying correlative rank analyses approaches in order to measure the “dominance power” of the top-ranking subsidy-recipient schools. The results show that the number of faculty members is the most influential for general subsidies, while the number of students is the most dominant variable for special subsidies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese education has been a focus of comparative studies for the past 20 years. Many scholars have attributed the economic success of this industrialized society to a highly literate and well-educated population. Recent studies, however, have tended to be more critical of, in particular, Japanese higher education (HE). Indeed, most universities in Japan are acutely aware of the need for change and a considerable effort at institutional reform is sweeping the nation. Unfortunately most of the constructive criticism of Japanese HE has not yet been published in English. One of the most vocal of the reformists, Professor Ikuo Amano, has published widely on various aspects of HE in Japan. The following paper is a translation of a chapter in his book Challenges to Japanese Universities. This translation is prefaced by both a synopsis of this book as well as a brief introduction to Amano and his work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of different parties in Japan have been discussing higher educational reform for over thirty years. Many of these ideas finally started to take form in the 1990s as the Ministry of Education's University Council began implementing many of the propositions that had been put forth during the deliberations of the 1970s and 1980s. As Japan enters the 21st century, its 18-year-old population has decreased by over half a million since 1992. It will decrease another 300,000 by the year 2010. This has added an increased urgency to make reforms, especially at third-tier universities, which are now starting to have trouble recruiting students. Japan's Ministry of Education would also like to bring the quality of its university educational standards up to par with the rest of the advanced nations. Moreover, industry is demanding a new breed of employee – and one much different than the Japanese educational system has been known to produce. Finally, a new generation of Japanese is starting to reach adulthood, who – raised on consumerism, and material abundance – have a completely different value system than their parents' generation. This paper looks at the present higher education reform movement and its history extending back approximately thirty years. It then goes on to offer some suggestions as to what more can be done to alleviate many problems still inherent in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]