Feature Article

Trends in Access to Higher Educationin JapanDavid Laurence
Chubu University Department of English Language and Culture
The Japanese higher education system faces ever-growing challenges as demographic
shifts have moved the country from “mass” to “universal” access to higher education. As
universities compete for a shrinking pool of potential students to fill seats in a still-growing
national higher education system, institutions find themselves under pressure to put inplace policies which relax acceptance and retention standards in order to remain financially
viable. These policies have led to a number of changes across the Japanese higher education
system in terms of the readiness of incoming students for the rigors of university-level study,
and in their attitudes towards that study. These demographic trends, and the pressuresthey tend to put on university-level recruitment and retention policy, have profoundeffects on post-secondary education in this country. These shifts are already changing what
university-level educators teach, who has access to higher education, and how educators willneed to approach students who enter university from non-traditional backgrounds. Bothuniversities and educators will be forced to reevaluate their fundamental ideas about higher
education in order to remain competitive and viable.

I have been investigating the topic of how demographic changes are affecting
Japanese higher education for only a few years, but even in this short time I haveoften found myself struck by the degree to which educators in Japan, and inparticular foreign educators in Japan, are unaware of the issues I will describe inthis paper. This is particularly troubling because, as I hope to describe, the issues
surrounding access to higher education in this country have profound ramifications
for our jobs as educators. As these demographic shifts continue, university-level
educators will be called to prepare our students for success at university, be it
through study skills, time-management skills, or even softer interpersonal skills
that our students might lack. This might be in purpose-built remedial classes,
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Laurencebut as more students come to us with less of this sort of preparation, it will more
likely become a part of teaching in every class. This is in contrast to what manyof us may have experienced as undergraduates in quite different contexts, where
professors could afford to take a hard-line “sink or swim” stance that we simply
do not have the luxury to take. While this change will necessarily encompass all
university-level instructors in this country, Japanese or foreign, the linguistic andsocial isolation many foreign instructors face here may well leave many with lessdirect support than they might like, requiring them to take some initiative in
implementing these changes in their own practice.

Demographic Trends

Readers will be well aware that Japan is an aging society; it is expected that by2025 more than one-third of the total population will be 65 or older (Kalache,
Barreto, & Keller, 2005). The expected effects of this demographic shift on theJapanese higher education system are every bit as profound as those we are seeing
in other areas.
Between 1990 and 2010, the number of 18-year-olds in this country fell bynearly 40%, from just over 2 million to about 1.2 million individuals (Statistics
Bureau, Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, 2014). Over the same
period, the number of students entering four-year universities increased by nearly
15%, from about 540,000 to 620,000, according to a report from the Ministryof Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) (Ministry of
Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, 2012). In a short twenty
years, the number of seats for new students in four-year universities has climbed
from about 25% of the total 18-year-old population to more than half; by way ofcomparison, about 30% of the age cohort in the United States (slightly less in theUK) is enrolled in 4-year higher education institutions (HEIs) (National Center
for Education Statistics, 2012). The number of young people entering higher
education in Japan rises to more than 60% if we consider the roughly 130,000
students admitted to 2-year junior and technical colleges in 2010.
As educators, of course, most of us are no doubt pleased to hear that moreyoung people are being afforded the chance to go to university. Surely, the262

Access to Higher Education in Japan, OnCUE Journal, 9(3), pages 261-272

chance to attend university is a benefit, which should be extended to all people
who want it. Indeed, in the best of all possible worlds, this would be the case;but the speed at which these changes have occurred has left much of the Japanesehigher education system spinning, struggling to meet the new needs of a rapidlychanging student body. Indeed, this is a common phenomenon, seen in many
contexts where access to higher education changes, especially when it changes
rapidly.

University in a High-Access Setting

Martin Trow (Burrage, 2010) wrote extensively about the American higher
education context beginning in the mid-1970s, and described some generaltrends in access to higher education, which describe the changes in the Japanesecontext in general terms. Most important for this discussion is the concept of“universal” access to higher education—something of a misnomer, as Trow
reckoned that universal access began at around 50% access to higher education.
Fundamentally, however, universal access describes a situation in which a space inthe higher education system exists for every person who wants one; the market issaturated. Trow describes some general trends we can expect to see in a universalaccess market, which I will outline below; the rest of this section gives a general
overview of his theories and observations regarding increased access to higher
education.
First, as the potential pool of students shrinks relative to the number of seatsavailable in a system of higher education, competition between institutions
increases. Education becomes a commodity, and universities find themselvesmore and more accountable to market forces. As recruitment becomes
more competitive, individual institutions also become more accountable tostakeholders and potential stakeholders; universities must be more and more
ready to show potential students and their parents exactly how an education canhelp them, and to do so in a competitive way. Thanks to these market pressures,
universities are administrated as businesses, with professional administrators
who are more removed from the university faculty in outlook.
Somewhat ironically, this increased competition tends to lead to increased263

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stratification between high-prestige and low-prestige institutions in a higher
education market with wide access to higher education. To retain recruitment
numbers, higher-prestige institutions are forced to “recruit down,” taking instudents who would have attended lower-prestige universities in a less-saturated
market. This continues down the prestige chain, until institutions quite low on
the prestige scale will be recruiting students who in the past would not havebeen afforded the chance to attend university at all. The net result of this is thathigh-prestige institutions may see very little net effect on the character of theirincoming students, while low-prestige institutions find themselves having to deal
with students who have very little preparation for university-level study, whether
academic or social (Huang, 2012; Yonezawa & Kim, 2008).
Finally, a universal-access market sees a shift in how higher education is seenin the wider society. At the lowest levels of access, “elite” in Trow’s terminology,
access to higher education is seen as a privilege of the rich and powerful. As
access grows towards Trow’s “mass access” level, a university education is seen
less as a privilege and more as a right—something that anyone with appropriate
levels of intelligence or talent should be given the opportunity to take advantage
of. At the universal level, however, higher education is seen more as a necessity;a university-level education is needed to get ahead in society. This change inperception of higher education brings with it a change in how students approach
their educations. In an elite system, students are aware that the primary purposeof a university education is to prepare them as members of the social elite; in somesense, what is learned is less important than the setting, the shared paradigm,
and the social connections higher education provides. But in a universal system,
students have a strong expectation that a university education will give them aset of concrete skills to apply to their professional lives after graduation; there isless patience for coursework that cannot be seen as directly applicable to life after
university.

The Japanese Context: Impact on Policy

Thus, we can see that the Japanese higher education system as a whole—bothprivate and public—faces a demographic crunch: fewer students and more seats264

Access to Higher Education in Japan, OnCUE Journal, 9(3), pages 261-272

to fill. This leaves individual institutions with two basic options, both of which
they must pursue to succeed. First, get a larger share of the available students(to simply keep student numbers constant means recruiting a larger percentage
share of the total number of 18-year-olds), and second, keep those students in thesystem (Altbach, Reisberg, & Rumbley, 2010). Failure to do either of these in thecurrent economic climate will likely leave a university with a rapidly-shrinking
student body and eventual contraction or outright economic failure.
Universities have two primary avenues for increasing recruitment: making
the school more attractive to potential students, and recruiting a wider variety
of students. Making the school more attractive can take many forms; the mostobvious, perhaps, is the process of adding and improving facilities and beautifying
campuses. We can certainly see this process at universities across Japan today,
what might be described as the “climbing wall effect” in the American context(Altbach, Gumport, & Berdahl, 2011), where universities feel pressure to havethe newest and most-popular facilities (the classic example being a climbing wall)
to make themselves attractive to potential students. While this trend brings withit the same dangers which Altbach, Gumport and Berdahl (2011) described interms of a dropping percentage of university expenditure on education, it cannot
be denied that a beautiful campus with attractive facilities helps to bring in newstudents in a competitive environment.
More difficult to see, especially for the professionally and socially isolated
foreign instructor in the Japanese setting, is the use of admissions, graduation,and job placement data as a recruitment tool. This means that not only is thisdata often made public, but that the university will find itself under a great
deal of pressure to make these statistics as attractive as possible. Thus at theinstitutional level, most universities will want high admissions rates, graduation
rates, and job placement rates, which often means relaxed standards for entrance
and graduation, thus affecting the quality of incoming students and expectationsin the classroom (Huang, 2012; Yonezawa & Kim, 2008). As discussed
previously, these effects will be felt most keenly in lower-prestige institutions anddepartments; institutions like these will not only face the pressure to increaseadmissions rates described here, but will be forced to recruit from a less well265

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prepared pool of students to begin with, as higher-prestige institutions dip into
their traditional recruiting pool to make up for smaller numbers (Yonezawa& Kim, 2008). These lower-level students will then often find themselves in asetting with relaxed standards for passing and graduation, placing little pressure
on them to perform academically. The potential effects of these policies in theclassroom are easy to see.
Along with making the university more attractive to potential students,
many institutions will try to widen the net, recruiting a wider variety of students.
As non-traditional students are still a largely untapped resource in Japanesehigher education—less than 3% of students entering Japanese universities in2015 were over 20 years of age, according to MEXT (2016)—this often means
adding and expanding programs and services: adding departments and degreegranting programs, for example. Such a strategy is often difficult in the shortterm, as newly-added departments will have poor teacher-to-student ratios andthus poor profitability, producing a drain on institutional resources. The otherprimary avenue for widening recruitment is, again, relaxing entrance standards,
which has the added effect of feeding back into recruitment as described above.
As the shrinking population of students leaves fewer potential students
waiting in the wings to replace students who leave university early, the othermajor tactic Japanese universities must employ is working to retain students.
Again, there are two primary tracks for this strategy. The first way, easier inthe short term, is to relax grading and graduation standards to ensure thatfewer students flunk out, a policy made more attractive by the fact that relaxedgraduation standards are also an excellent recruitment tool. Many educators at
lower-prestige universities in Japan whom I have talked to in the course of myresearch report are finding themselves under pressure at the administrative levelto pass students whenever possible. Such policies are related to these pressures.
Another way, more difficult in the short term perhaps, is working harder toensure that students successfully transition into higher education. New student
seminars and learning cohorts are one common strategy here, as is holding
individual departments and teachers accountable for low attendance rates
and asking instructors to closely follow-up on struggling and at-risk students.
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Particularly coupled with the change in general preparedness of incoming
students for university-level study described above, this can be a daunting task.
Many instructors find themselves ill-equipped and poorly trained for a job thatthey may not even feel is part of the job of a university-level instructor, having
been educated themselves in contexts where it explicitly was not.
To summarize, many Japanese universities are implementing a coupled pairof strategies. On the one hand, universities are relaxing entrance standards,
admitting more students with a wider range of academic backgrounds, especiallyat lower-prestige institutions, more students who are less prepared for universitylevel study. At the same time, universities are relaxing academic standards for
current students, making it easier for students to pass and graduate, and using
these entrance and grading standards as recruitment tools. These dual policies
can have an enormous impact on the character of university students today: more
students are entering university less well-prepared for all aspects of universitylevel study, without adequate support to integrate into university academicallyor socially, and without the impetus to learn to be good students on their own.

University Students in a High-Access Context

The pressures on Japanese higher education I have described, and the institutionlevel policies they tend to lead to, can be expected to have powerful effects on thecharacter of university students in this country. There are two areas that will havea particular impact in the classroom setting: new students’ approaches to higher
education, and their readiness for university-level study.
In a high-access higher education setting, more and more students will see
a university education as something that they need to do; more students will
be attending university not necessarily because they want to, but because theyfeel, or are told, that they must. These students may have fewer concrete goals or
expectations as to what they will achieve at university, and fewer concrete plansfor how to use their university education in the future. Realistic and appropriate
goal-setting has been well-studied as a factor in success (Elliott & Dweck, 1988),
and in the same vein many studies have shown that lack of realistic expectations
for university-level study can be a predictor of lack of success (Byrne et al., 2012;267

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Grimes, 1997; Ozga & Sukhnandan, 1998). Additionally, more students will
see a university education as something that must help them in concrete ways,
and will view the student-university relationship as a primarily transactional one.
These students will be less patient with courses or content that are not obviously
helpful to them or applicable to the “real world”. Finally, expectations engenderedby policies aimed at raising graduation rates and relaxing educational standards
may well lead students to believe that university is something they should expect
to succeed at.
Readiness for university-level education can also be expected to see a shift.
Lower-prestige universities in particular, often forced to recruit students from apool of young people who would not have had the chance to attend university
in even the quite recent past, will have to recruit students with less-rigorous
academic preparation, not only in terms of simple knowledge, but also, andperhaps more importantly, in terms of study skills. Such students will be lessprepared for the sort of time management and task prioritization skills that arenecessary for success at university (but only very rarely taught directly). At least as
importantly, however, students coming from these non-traditional backgrounds
will have less social support for success at university; fewer people around them,whether peers or family members, will have the experience of going to university
and the ability to give important understanding, advice, and help if the student
struggles.
In short, in the current climate of higher education in this country, an
expanding higher education system is forced to admit a larger percentage ofstudents who are at the same time less prepared for university-level education,
both academically and socially, and who feel that university is something thateveryone should be able to succeed at. This creates a generation gap of sorts
between students and faculty, exacerbated by the rapid pace of the change here.
A typical foreign faculty member here, who attended university outside of Japan
15 or 20 years ago, will not only have gone to university in a much different
setting access-wise, but will have had professors (who shaped this hypothetical
instructor’s view of what a university professor is) who were educated in, andinherited outlooks from, a vastly different context, whether generational,
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cultural, or both in the case of older foreign instructors. Add to this that many
who enter careers in education, especially at the university level, will haveadvanced degrees and the approach to education that this requires, and we cansee how faculty mindsets might be very different indeed from those of the typicalstudent today.

Implications for Educators in JapaneseInstitutions of Higher Education

As university educators in Japan, many of us find ourselves under twin pressures.
On one hand, our institutions are, out of pure economic necessity, widening theadmissions net, changing the face of our student body. Many of our students are
and will continue to be less well-prepared for higher education, both academicallyand socially, than even in the recent past. On the other hand, our institutions are,again out of necessity, asking us to increase our retention and graduation rates.
In some sense, this gives us two choices. One is to dumb it down, throw
up our hands, and pass and graduate all our students, regardless of how muchor how well they learn. Or we can realize that higher education has changed,
fundamentally and irreversibly, and that we need to change our very approachto our jobs, in terms of how we see our struggling students, how we engage withthem, and what we must teach them. Rather than dumbing down, universitylevel educators need to change what we do in order to pull our students up to
give them the skills, both hard and soft, that they need to succeed at university.

Concluding Remarks

All too often, I meet university-level educators who bemoan “students these days”
and their unwillingness to do even the simplest work to succeed. It is certainly
a seductive position to take, to place the burden and blame in the laps of thestudents, and it is absolutely true that the changes I have outlined in this paper
create a sometimes frustrating set of challenges for university faculty here. At
the same time, though, whenever I present on this topic I am struck by how
little foreign faculty members in Japan are aware of the underlying issues I havedescribed here. Much of this comes down to lack of communication between
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Japanese administration and (often part-time or short-contract) Englishspeaking faculty, and even in some cases between administration and Japanesespeaking faculty. Many foreign faculty members I speak to see policies such as I
have described as stupid, short-sighted, ill-informed, and some feel that they wish
they could take a hard-line stance and simply flunk out all the students who failto meet their standards.
But in the end, I think that we need to realize that, whatever we wish our jobs
were, and whatever we wish our students were like, the simple reality is that thisis the state of higher education in this country today. These are the students weget, and that is simply not going to change. We need to realize that, by admittingthese young people to university, we have taken on an ethical responsibility to
educate them at the university level, and what that means is very different fromwhat it meant when many of us were undergraduates ourselves. Today, in thiscountry, and especially at lower-prestige institutions, it means that we must teachmany of our students how to be successful university students. This may conflictwith our ideas about what a university professor does, and we might come fromcontexts that romanticized a sink or swim approach from professors. But this is
the reality in which we find ourselves, and this is what it means to be a university
instructor in Japan today.

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Author bio

David Laurence has been teaching English in Japan since 1996, and at Chubu
University since 2008. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the University ofLiverpool’s Doctorate of Education – Higher Education program, and this paper
stems from the research he is conducting there. laurence@isc.chubu.ac.jp
Received: January 18, 2016
Accepted: December 1, 2016272