Discussion Paper Series

University of Tokyo

Institute of Social Science
Panel Survey
東京大学社会科学研究所 パネル調査プロジェクト
ディスカッションペーパーシリーズ

Inequality of Opportunities forAccess to Universities among
the Japanese Young People: Focused on the Scholarship Loan Program
Wataru NAKAZAWA(Faculty of Sociology, Toyo University)

February 2009
No.20

INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE

東京大学社会科学研究所
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYOInstitute of Social Sciences
University of Tokyo
Panel Survey Project Discussion Paper Series No. 20
February 2009

Inequality of Opportunities for Access to Universities among the Japanese Young
People: Focused on the Scholarship Loan Program

Wataru Nakazawa (Faculty of Sociology, Toyo University)Inequality of Opportunities for Access to Universities among the Japanese Young
People: Focused on the Scholarship Loan Program
Wataru Nakazawa (Toyo University)
Abstract
This paper discusses the contribution of Japanese loan scholarship programs to the
reduction of inequality in access to university education in Japan. Owing to the
popularity of university education, the tuition fees have gradually increased, although
the average household income has not. This could pose a serious problem for those who
cannot afford to pay for an expensive university education. Under such conditions, ascholarship program plays a very important role because such a program is expected toreduce inequality in university education. However, most scholarship programs in Japanare actually student loans; we rarely find a full scholarship or direct grant offered to
students with low household income. Nevertheless, about 40% of university students
avail of a scholarship program, for example, the loan program of the Japan Student
Services Organization (JASSO), which is well-known and used by many Japanese
students. Although there exist certain standards for grades and household incomes indetermining who uses JASSO’s scholarship program, it is not difficult to meet thesestandards. In addition, the pressure of repaying the loan in the future may prevent many
students who cannot afford to pay the tuition fees from using this program. Therefore, it
is doubtful whether such scholarship programs have really contributed to reducing
inequality in university education. If these scholarship programs were provided to thestudents who might give up university education owing to a lack of funds, there will bea negative correlation between students who receive scholarships and other university
students on the basis of their socioeconomic backgrounds. A bivariate probit model isestimated in order to determine this relationship. However, the result demonstrates thatthe decision to pursue a university education and availing of a scholarship are
independent of each other. Although the scholarship programs provided more benefits to
respondents belonging to the manual and farming classes as compared to those from thenonmanual class, the Japanese scholarship programs encouraged those who could notafford the university tuition fees to pursue a university education.

-1-

1. INTRODUCTION
The aim of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of Japanese loan scholarshipprograms toward the reduction of inequalities in students’ access to universities. In
recent times, the Japanese mass media have started focusing on the issue of expansionof income differentials; this topic has caught the attention of many Japanese people aswell. According to Ishida (2007), although the proportion of progression to universities
has increased since the 1990s, the effects of social background on advancement touniversities have increased. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science andTechnology (MEXT) and the Japan Student Services Organization (JASSO), as of 2004,
conducted a large survey among students affiliated with institutions of higher education,
focusing on their actual conditions of life every two years. In 2006, the average tuition
fee of daytime courses in public four-year universities was about ¥660,000, and that of
their counterpart, that is private universities, was about ¥1,320,000. If a student starts
living in lodging, the total annual cost of living would exceed ¥1,000,000. Compared tothe data of 1998, the tuition fee of the national universities increased by ¥60,000～¥100,000, and that of the private universities increased by ¥90,000. However, the costof living decreased by over ¥100,000.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of the annual household income of the university
students who are affiliated with daytime courses. Although the mode of the householdincome group had been the stratum between ten and eleven million yen, it moved thestratum between eight and nine million yen in 2006. Generally, the proportion ofhigh-income groups whose annual incomes are over ten million yen decreased. Since
the rate of advancement to universities has gradually increased since the 1990s, we may
attribute the decrease of the average household income to popularization. This implies
that the people who would not have progressed to universities before the 1980s tend tochoose the advancement to universities due to the expansion of universities and themitigation of competition for entrance examinations. However, this also implies that thepressure to gain admission into universities may become universal, and it may become aserious problem for people who cannot afford to pay expensive tuition fees.
According to a survey conducted by JASSO in 2004, eighty-six thousand
students used the scholarship program offered by JASSO, which was reorganized by theJapan Scholarship Foundation in 2004; twenty-seven thousand students used other
scholarship programs. In 1999, the former figure was fifty-nine thousand, while thelatter figure was twenty-four thousand. With regard to university students, overfour-fifth students on a scholarship used the program offered by JASSO. Note that mostof the scholarship programs in Japan, including that of the JASSO, are based on student-2-

loans. Compared to other OECD countries, we can barely find real “scholarships” ordirect grants offered to households in Japan. Nevertheless, about 40% of university
students use any scholarship program including JASSO’s loan. Although there arestandards of grades and household incomes, which play a decisive role in using
JASSO’s scholarship loan program, it is not difficult to pass these standards. Figure 2
shows the distribution of the annual household income of the university students in thisprogram affiliated with daytime courses. Certainly, the mode seems to move to the left
as compared to Figure 1. However, over 10% of households exceed nine million yen
annually, which implies that they are relatively wealthy people. Since this program only
provides student loans, the pressure of repayment in the future may prevent many
students, who cannot afford to pay tuition fees, from using this program.
2. JLPS
Since it is difficult to find and obtain micro-data of the household income, the use ofscholarships and student loan programs, and the cost of education, the studies on therelationship among economic inequality and educational opportunity and thescholarship programs are inactive. Therefore, I investigated the effects of economic
inequality on the use of any type of scholarship program by analyzing the Japanese
Life-Course Panel Survey (JLPS) conducted by the Institute of Social Science,
University of Tokyo. The questionnaire of the wave 2 survey, conducted in 2008,
included detailed information on the respondents’ educational histories. I prepared a
new dummy variable indicating whether the respondents used any type of scholarshipprogram including JASSO’s education loan when they were university students.
Our main interest lies in the fact that the scholarship program contributed to theprogression to university for people who could not afford to pay tuition fees. It is easy
to estimate the effects on the use of scholarship programs among the university
attendees. Some socioeconomic backgrounds and grades will have significant effects on
the use of scholarship programs. However, we have to remember that scholarshipprograms could be used by only university attendees. Since the estimation among theuniversity attendees excluded people who did not attend university education due to thelack of solvency of tuition fee, the estimation may be contaminated. In other words,
there might be an unobservable correlation between the choice of using scholarshipprograms and of advancement to universities. Therefore, in this article, a bivariate
probit model is estimated and compared with the coefficients of a single probit model.
The dependent variable of the bivariate probit model is that whether the respondents
progressed to university education (selection equation) and whether they used the-3-scholarship programs (outcome equation). If ρ, which refers to the correlation of theseprobit equations’ error terms, is negative, the people who used the scholarship programsmust have the opposite tendency toward the people who were more likely to progress touniversities, after controlling for measured characteristics. In other words, the university
attendees were not a subsample of the high school attendees. University attendees weremore likely to have high socioeconomic backgrounds than non-university attendees(Dubin and Rivers 1989/90).
In this analysis, I used gender, parents’ education, fathers’ occupation, property
owned when the respondents were 15 years old, and the grade obtained when they wereseniors at high school, as independent variables. Gender is a dummy variable that isindicative of males. Parents’ education is classified into three groups: compulsory
education, post-secondary education (reference category), and higher education.
Fathers’ occupation is divided into service class (professionals and managerial workers),
clerical workers (reference category), sales workers, manual workers, and farmers. The
wave 1 questionnaire contains twenty questions on whether their family owned one
object when the respondents were 15 years old. I regarded the proportion of the
respondents who did not have each object as the scores and summed up them. The scoreincreases if people owned many precious things. I considered this score as a proxy of
the household economic conditions that prevailed when they were growing up, because
we could not obtain the accurate household income in those days and therefore called ita property variable. Finally, grade is divided into five stages, and a larger score implies
high achievement compared to other classmates. According to the Stata manual, for themodel to be well identified, the selection equation should have at least one variable thatis not in the outcome equation when we estimate the bivariate probit models. Therefore,
I included the high school course dummy variable, which is indicative of non-academic
courses in the selection equation.
3. RESULTS
The result of my analysis is shown in Table 1. The left column shows the single probit
coefficients, which determined whether the respondents used any scholarship programsin a sample of university attendees. The column on the bottom right shows thecoefficients of the selection equation, which determined whether the respondents
progressed to university in the entire sample, and the column of the top right shows thecoefficients of the outcome equation, which determined whether they used any
scholarship programs among the university attendees. When we compare both thecoefficients of the outcome equation, we can see that the results seem similar, except-4-that the grade increases the predicting power, and property and fathers’ occupation
decreases it at the bivariate probit estimation. The result of selection equation showsthat socioeconomic variables still have a strong predicting power for expecting
advancement to universities, and it is coherent to preceding research. Among theuniversity attendees, people whose fathers engaged in manual work or agricultural worktended to use the scholarship programs as compared to the people whose fathers
engaged in clerical work. However, ρ, which implies the correlation of error terms
between outcome and selection equation, was not statistically significant. The result
demonstrates that the decision to progress to university and the decision to use any
scholarship programs are independent of each other.
In sum, the result reveals that we were unable to prove that Japanese scholarshipprograms have contributed to providing more opportunities of attending university topeople who could not attend without these scholarships. Obviously, the benefits ofscholarship programs were provided to respondents belonging to the manual andfarming class as compared to those from the nonmanual class. However, since these two
decisions were unrelated, it is doubtful whether the Japanese scholarship programs
encouraged people, who could not afford to attend university without these programs, toprogress to universities. Ito and Suzuki (2002) demonstrated that the scholarships fromthe Japan Scholarship Foundation were not used effectively, which implies thescholarship loans were not used for studies or books but for food, telephone bills, andtravel abroad. They concluded that since the standards of scholarship programs were
unclear, scholarships were not used effectively. As I mentioned above, most Japanesescholarship programs imply education loans, and the proportion of private payment forhigher education is very high. We should notice that while there are many people who
do not use scholarship programs in spite of a low-income household, there are many
people who use the scholarship programs in spite of a high-income household. It is
possible that people fear the heavy repayment of these loans in the future. When thescholarship loan is small, the effects may also be small. On the other hand, when thescholarship loan is large, people do not want to use this program due to the future
repayment factor. Scholarship programs, which are based solely on grades regardless ofthe household economic conditions, may exist; however, they seem to be a rarity inJapan. If high educational credentials are important in Japanese society, the benefit ofuniversity education is more likely to be provided to people who can originally pay
expensive tuition fees. In other words, the recent expansion of university education does
not improve the inequality prevalent in student’s access to universities, and theeconomic differentials may become clearer through this higher education system.

-5-

Considering the low public expenditure for higher education, it is necessary for thegovernment to undertake certain measures to resolve these problems.
REFERENCES
Dubin, Jeffery A., and Douglas Rivers. 1989/90. “Selection Bias in Linear Regression,
Logit and Probit Models,” Sociological Methods and Research, 18(2&3): 360–390.
Ishida, Hiroshi. 2007. “Japan: Educational Expansion and Inequality in Access toHigher Education,” Yossi Shavit, Richard Arum, and Adam Gamoran eds.
Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study, Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Ito, Yukiko, and Wataru Suzuki. 2002. “Nihon-Ikueikai no Shogakukin wa Yuko ni
Tsukawarete-iruka? (Are the Scholarships by Japan Scholarship Foundation Used
Effectively?),” SSJDA Research Paper Series (Institute of Social Science, Universityof Tokyo), 23: 51–65.

-6-

Table 1 Probit Estimates of Receiving Scholarships and Advancement to Universities
Outcome Equation (Scholarship)
Independent Probit

Bivariate Probit

Coef.

Coef.

S.E.

S.E.

Male

-.134 .088-.027 .129

Property
Grade
Father: Compulsory Education
Father: Higher Education
Mother: Compulsory Education
Mother: Higher Education

-.095
.116
.003
.020
.156
.030

.037 *.037 **
.158
.107
.164
.110

-.084
.134
-.025
.074
.088
.071

.038 *.039 **
.158
.115
.174
.114

Father: Service Class
Father: Sales Workers
Father: Manual Workers
Father: Farmers
Constant

-.005
.264
.344
.622
-1.026

.126
.140
.126
.274
.204

.005
+
.229
**
.301
*
.544
*** -1.362

.125
.142
.132 *.282 +.348 ***

Selection(University)
Coef.
Male

S.E.

.748 .056 ***Property
Grade
Father: Compulsory Education
Father: Higher Education
Mother: Compulsory Education
Mother: Higher Education
Father: Service Class
Father: Sales Workers
Father: Manual Workers
Father: Farmers
High School Vocational Track
Constant

.064
.192
-.086
.370
-.426
.415
.129
-.195
-.215
-.457
-1.130-1.172

ρ

.024
.025
.087
.070
.089
.077
.087
.090
.079
.156
.080
.128

.249 .229

Uncensored Observations
Censored Observations

1153

-7-

1153
1559

**
***
***
***
***
*
**
**
***
***

-2 Log Likelihood
+<.10

*<.05

**<.011143.086***<.001-8-4293.050

Figure 1 The Distribution of the Annual Household Income(Daytime Course, All University Students)
Source: JASSO & MEXT

20
15

%

10
5

1998

2000

2002

15～

13～14

million yen

11～12

9～10

7～8

5～6

3～4

～2

0

2004

2006

Figure 2 The Distribution of the Annual Household Income(Daytime Course, University Students on a Scholarship)
Source: JASSO & MEXT
16
12
8

1998

2000

2002

2004

-9-

15～

13～14

million yen

11～12

9～10

7～8

5～6

0

3～4

4
～2

%

2006

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