Comment on “Japan's Higher Education Policies under Global Challenge”

Yonezawa (2023) points out that the Japanese government started to put Japan's top universities at the core of the national economic policy in the last couple of decades. Improving the quality of Japanese universities and establishing closer collaborations with the government and industry are now considered essential for reinvigorating Japan's economic growth. The government wanted the universities to provide the seeds for new businesses through innovative research and equip students with new skills fit for the future labor market. Yonezawa (2023) describes how the government tried to achieve these goals, especially during the Abe administration (2012–2020). Yonezawa claims the policies were unsuccessful and lists several major reasons for their failure.

The discussion in the paper is consistent with my understanding of the Japanese government's policy toward universities, especially the former national universities. Although I mostly agree with the main conclusion of Yonezawa (2023) that the policy was not successful, here I point out several issues that need further clarification.

Thus, the whole point of creating imperial universities was to advance national goals. The imperial universities were important tools to promote the national policy of “rich nation, strong army” by expanding technological knowledge and training technocrats. After World War II, the imperial universities continued to be Japan's top universities with little restructuring and contributed to achieving the national goal of economic development by further advancing technologies and producing skilled workers for industry and government.

Second, Yonezawa (2023) argues that Japan's policy toward universities in this century has been based on the ideas of “neoliberalism,” but at the same time discusses how the government strengthened its grip over the management of universities. National universities, which belonged to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT), became separate entities called Dokuritsu Gyōsei Hōjin (Independent Administrative Agency) in 2004, but they continued to receive funding for their operational expenditures from the government at gradually reduced levels. More importantly, the government changed the allocation mechanism from a formula-based one to a performance-based one, with performance assessed periodically by the MEXT. This made the former national universities rather more dependent on the government, and they competed to come up with plans that better fit the government's policy. This does not sound like “neoliberalism” at all.

Starting with the program on Centers of Excellence (COE), the government provided additional financial support for selected universities to “foster world-class universities and research.” As Yonezawa (2023) correctly points out, however, the new funding was often just enough to cover the expenses of additional projects to acquire the designation of a COE. Thus, the policies with the stated goal of creating Japanese universities with autonomous management that compete for excellence in the global market ended up making Japanese universities more influenced by government policies. I agree with Yonezawa's conclusion that government micromanagement and insufficient funding are two major reasons why Japan's policies toward universities in the last couple of decades failed.

One can go further and argue that the policies have not just failed but actually hurt the competitiveness of Japanese universities by making them spend effort on responding to government demands without any substantial increase in financial support. Figure 1 compares the average salaries for university professors in Japan and the U.S. The average salaries at the professor level were similar for two countries in the 1990s, but the gap started to widen in the early 2000s. Since then, Japanese universities have seriously fallen behind US universities. This has hurt the ability of Japanese universities to compete for talents in the global market.

Finally, Yonezawa (2023) includes a discussion of the “10 Trillion Yen Fund,” the latest government policy to supposedly make Japanese universities world-class, but this part needs more discussion. The policy sets up an investment fund of 10 trillion yen that is financed by 1.1 trillion yen of government funds and 8.9 trillion yen of borrowing (from the government). The government hopes to generate enough returns on the fund to distribute 0.3 trillion yen out of this fund annually to a very selective set of universities that will become world-leading institutions. The universities that want to be in the selected group have to show credible plans to reform their governance, improve the quality of their research, and grow in size. Since the government will decide if the universities' plans are credible, the government will continue letting the universities compete to appear to be in line with the direction set by the government. The new policy could bring substantial new funding to the selected universities (if the fund succeeds in generating high enough returns) and allow them to compete in the global market, but the government's influence on the management of those universities can become more intense. The policy may end up being classified as another failure of Japanese higher education policy.