Quality Assurance in Education through the Diploma Policy and President's Message - An Analysis Focused on Local Community

Abstract

Universities play an important role as centers of local communities. In recent years, new faculties and graduate schools have been established for students to learn about solving problems through local community involvement. In this study, we conduct an inter-university comparison and analyze the common points and differences between eight targeted universities. These include national universities (nine departments) that use the word "community" ("chi-i-ki" in Japanese) in the name of a department. We use the term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf), which is one of the popular indexes in text mining, and apply it to two documents, i.e., the diploma policy (DP) and the president's message (PM). We extracted two groups from the target universities. One group had relatively high tf-idf value in terms of the word "community" across the two documents. The other group had a relatively low tf-idf value in their DP. Furthermore, the word "community" does not appear in the PM. All universities have established faculties in order to connect with local communities, although the strategies of each university demonstrate different priorities from each other.