The Predicted Implosion of Japan’s Private Higher Education System

This chapter tells the story of Japanese higher education from 1992 to 2010, from a period of great stability to one of anticipated implosion. It outlines the widely agreed features of Japanese higher education in the early 1990s, including a clearly defined university hierarchy, high demand for university places, high fees, low drop-out rates, direct links to the labour market, low rates of progression to graduate education, high rate of academic inbreeding, and slow progress on internationalization. Overall, the system was seen as highly developed and relatively stable, but just 10 years later virtually all of these features were under challenge. 1992 saw a peak both in the number of 18-year-olds in the Japanese population and in the global power of the Japanese economy. As the economy went into slowdown and then stagnation and the number of 18-year-olds shrank precipitously, so the voices of those predicting an implosion in the private university sector became louder. The chapter explains why this implosion was considered inevitable because of three intersecting facts: students were recruited almost entirely from school leavers; participation rates were already high; and there would be a 40 per cent drop in the number of school leavers in the population between 1992 and 2010. It then introduces some of the assumptions which followed from this anticipated implosion: dramatic drops in enrolment and revenue; bankruptcies and closures; the search for new markets and modes of operation; a questioning of the whole value of a university degree.

Private Universities as Family Business

This chapter explains how Japanese family businesses in general, and family-run universities in particular, operate in practice and some of the negative and positive tropes with which they are frequently associated. These features include a high level of centralization, little voice for employees, top-down decision-making, and a particular concern over succession. The chapter develops the argument that family-run universities benefit from an ‘inbuilt resilience’, deriving from a preference for dealing with problems in-house and with the absolute minimum of disruption to the existing modus operandi; resilience built on a network of educational operations extending beyond a single university and allowing for significant cross-subsidies; robust connections with local business interests; and above all, an overriding concern with maintaining the integrity of the family business. This inbuilt resilience is a key to understanding the unexpected ability of Japan’s private universities to adapt to the dramatic demographic changes of the 1990s and 2000s. The chapter ends with a short discussion of possible outcomes of the next period of demographic decline from 2018 to 2030, suggesting that it may well be that the private university sector in Japan, with its inbuilt resilience and long experience of reacting to crises, will survive not only better than the current gloomy predictions but indeed than the public sector overall.

Japanese Private Universities in Comparative Perspective

Private higher education is an increasingly significant, ramified, and yet still conspicuously understudied topic. This chapter sets out various established and emerging models of private higher education, explaining key variables such as the relationship with state authority, diversity of institutional structures and modes of governance, and the interplay of social and commercial missions. It then asks where the Japanese system fits within these models and suggests a number of features which Japan shares with other countries. One of these features is the reliance of the state on the demand-absorbing role of private institutions—not one which is peripheral to the public system but rather the dominant mode of higher education provision and especially important in periods of rapid growth in participation rates. The chapter proceeds to develop a more Japan-specific profile of the private sector, establishing the definitional scope of private higher education in Japan and placing the numerical dominance of the private sector in direct contrast with its absolute disadvantage in terms of public investment. It also explains that, despite this handicap, private institutions do enjoy certain privileges in terms of governance structures, taxation, and scope of operations, and also boast distinctive educational strengths. To provide a context for understanding these features, the chapter also provides an in-depth history of the Japanese private university. This is offered as a conscious alternative to more orthodox historical accounts which tend to place national universities in the limelight and treat their private counterparts as a cast of supporting characters.

Introduction

This introduction provides an outline of the book and its key theoretical and methodological concerns. It explains the key puzzle which provides the starting point for the book’s investigation: the dramatic decline in university-age population in Japan since 1992 and fact that, contrary to the predictions of virtually all experts, the private university sector survived and indeed grew during this period. It outlines the ethnographic approach which the book takes to examining how private universities operated in this period of demographic change and highlights the book’s comparative scope and interest in what lessons can be learned from this story, not only about Japan and Japanese society but for the role of private universities more widely.

The Resilience of Japan’s Private Universities

This chapter returns to the dire predictions made in the early 2000s for the future of private higher education in Japan and finds that, while individual examples can be found on a micro level which support them, on a macro scale the evidence almost all points in the opposite direction. The number of private universities, students in private universities, the proportion of students going to private universities, full-time academic staff, revenue from student fees, and government subsidies are all greater and larger in 2018 than they were in 2004. The value of a university credential can be argued to have improved rather than to have been devalued. The development of alternative markets and modes of operation have been much more muted than predicted. Finally, predictions of the number of universities which would go bankrupt have proven spectacularly inaccurate. This chapter not only outlines these trends but also explains some of the reasons for them at the macro level. The final section of the chapter examines some of the key actions which have allowed private universities to survive the last fifteen years. It suggests that the power of various actors to contend with the macro forces in the early 2000s was greatly underestimated. It may well have been the dominant theoretical assumptions which commentators and academics brought to their analysis in the early 2000s which explains why their predictions for private higher education have not come to pass.

A University Under Fire

This is the first of two ethnographic chapters describing the situation at a private university (referred to using the pseudonym ‘MGU’) in the early 2000s as it was about to hit the bottom of a rapid decline in the number of applications and students. This account draws on kinship studies, anthropological theory, and ethnographic methods. It sets out the background history of MGU and the way it had positioned itself in the private higher education sector. It outlines the key features of its academic faculty, support staff, and students. It shows how well MGU was doing at the height of the 18-year-old population in 1992 and how badly by the mid-2000s. In particular, the account highlights two features. The first is that MGU was part of a conglomeration of family-run institutions. The second is the general level of dissatisfaction among staff towards management as the institution faced an increasingly insecure future combined with an equal level of frustration of management towards staff who would not change their practices to confront the problems the institution faced. These two features were perceived to be linked. Staff claimed that they had no information about the real state of affairs in the institution and hence felt powerless to do anything to change it. Management claimed to feel—reflecting the priorities of the classic kinship system in Japan—that it was their personal responsibility to sort out the problems; they felt a sense of duty towards those who had set MGU up, those currently running it and its linked institutions, and those who would take over in the future.

MGU 2008–18

This chapter continues the ethnographic account of the private university known as ‘MGU’ introduced in the previous chapter. It starts by explaining the most major reform project undertaken at MGU in the mid-2000s: the establishment of a graduate law school. It sets this story in the context of the history of law education in Japan and outlines the system of new graduate law schools introduced in 2004 before telling the story of the establishment and disestablishment of the MGU Law School itself. It gives an outline of the new graduate law schools and then tells the story of the establishment and disestablishment of the MGU Law School. It concludes that in the case of MGU, it was almost certainly better institutionally that the university had opened a law school rather than it had not, even though it closed after only a few years. The rest of the chapter looks at the other reforms which MGU introduced from the mid-2000s. These included reductions in admissions quota, full-time staff and fees, and the rationalization of facilities. Teaching and the student experience were taken much more seriously by the academic staff. Changes were also made in courses and course names. These and other reforms aside, there was also a significant generational shift within MGU’s owning family, as a new generation emerged and as the family itself sought to lead by example in the reform process. Overall, these responses helped MGU to survive the severe challenges it had faced in the mid-2000s and set if on an apparently stable course for the 2020s.