After the Expansion: The Japanese University Crisis and a Vision of the Post-University

Approaching the Catastrophe

The university is in a state of crisis. This crisis has both quantitative and qualitative, or structural, aspects (Readings, 1996). Additionally, there are predicaments unique to Japanese universities as well as difficulties being faced by universities worldwide. The main focus of this paper is to explain the dire situation that contemporary Japanese universities are confronting and to suggest ways to overcome it. However, it will also touch upon the broader crisis facing universities in the 21st century.

The crisis facing Japanese universities is, first and foremost, a quantitative issue. In 1945, there were fewer than 50 universities in Japan; today, that number has swollen to over 800. This is more than a 16-fold increase. In the early 1990s, there were about 500 universities in Japan. Despite the declining population of 18-year-olds since then, the number of universities has continued to grow by an additional 300. This increase resulted from the deregulation driven by the wave of neoliberalism that began in the 1980s, making it easier to establish universities (Yoshimi, 2011: 6–12).

Because the number of universities surged despite the declining population of 18-year-olds, excessive competition naturally ensued. To attract more applicants, universities devised various strategies. One prominent example is the explosive increase in the variety of department names. In 1990, there were 97 different department names; by 2015, this number had grown to 464. This increase is less about the expansion of specialized fields and more about universities giving colorful and diverse names to similar fields to attract applicants. As a result, there are a huge number of departments with unique names (Yoshimi, 2011: 218–23).

Nevertheless, Japan’s declining birthrate and aging population, along with continuous population decline, are intensifying the excessive competition among universities. In 2020, Japan’s population of 18-year-olds was approximately 1.2 million, but it is certain to drop to less than 800,000 by 2040. In Japan, university entrants are quite homogeneous in age, and the number of international students is limited. In other words, approximately 800 universities in Japan are vying for the population of 18-year-olds graduating from domestic high schools. Simply put, one-third of these 800 universities will need to disappear over the next 20 years. This means catastrophic changes await Japanese universities (Yoshimi, 2021: 10–16).

However, it is not only Japanese universities facing a crisis in the 21st century. With some regional exceptions, universities worldwide have been over-established, and the field is already saturated. Today, there are about 2,600 universities in the United States, approximately 1,800 in China, about 1,000 in Russia, and around 300 to 400 in countries like Germany and the United Kingdom. It is certain that the total number of universities worldwide exceeds 10,000, and if we include two-year and smaller institutions, the number is said to reach 20,000. The number of students attending these universities is said to exceed 200 million. Given the global human population of approximately 8 billion, this means that 1 in 40 people, or 2.5%, are university students. In developing countries, there might be suitable employment opportunities for these graduates, but in countries that have already reached the limits of economic growth, there is no societal demand to absorb them (Yoshimi, 2011: 6–9).

Japanese Universities in Neoliberal Reform

In Japan, since the 1990s, three major administrative reforms have been implemented, led by the government and top-tier universities. However, these reforms have not been successful and have instead tended to degrade the quality of university education. The first reform involved dismantling the barrier between liberal arts education and specialized education. Liberal arts faculty members were allowed to teach their own specialized fields, leading many to shift their focus to specialized education. Consequently, undergraduate liberal arts education became weakened over time.

The second reform emphasized graduate education, with many leading universities shifting their educational focus to graduate programs and expanding their admissions quotas for graduate students. However, since industry did not offer higher salaries to those with master’s or doctoral degrees, top students from elite universities began to avoid pursuing graduate and doctoral studies, leading to a decline in the overall quality of graduate students.

The third reform was the semi-privatization of national universities, positioning them in an intermediate status between ‘national’ and ‘private’ as ‘national university corporations’. As a result, while still under government oversight, national universities had to increase their proportion of external funding. Universities and departments capable of securing joint research projects and donations from corporations became wealthier, while those unable to do so became poorer. Central universities like the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University increased their revenues, but much of this flowed into science and engineering departments, widening the economic gap with humanities and social science departments. More severe, however, is the growing disparity between universities in Tokyo and those in rural areas. Local national universities faced economic difficulties due to declining populations and industrial decline, making it impossible to rely on external funding, affecting even their science departments (Yoshimi, 2011: 212–36).

As market principles have become prioritized, the preferences of university faculty and students have also changed. In short, the belief that economic value is decisive has spread widely. This is not limited to engineering and medical schools, which promote large-scale science and technology budgets and joint research with corporations. Even in the humanities and social sciences, where such large budgets cannot be expected, new research structures and educational programs have often been developed to secure research promotion funds.

Thus, today’s universities face not only a quantitative crisis but also a qualitative crisis, and more fundamentally, a crisis of the very concept of the university itself. Today, the fundamental question of ‘What is a university?’ has been lost among many university faculties, students, and society as a whole. Both the government and universities, as well as faculty members, are intensely focused on promoting research that yields short-term results and leads to budget acquisition. As economic principles penetrate deeper into universities, universities have almost become like the research labs of venture-capitalist companies. The idea that foundational research – which may not be immediately profitable and takes time – is essential for the long-term vision of the university has become a minority view.

Structural Reasons for the Crisis in Japan

The question is, what holds the key to overcoming such a complex crisis? Many discussions in Japan argue that there are too many universities with student enrollment over-capacity, pointing to the need for a reduction in scale. While this is undoubtedly true, the issue remains whether reducing the scale will lead to an improvement in the quality of universities. Even if many universities are closed or merged, the deterioration of the quality of Japanese universities may continue.

Secondly, there is the argument that the fundamental problem lies in the weak financial foundation of universities. However, regarding financial foundations, there is a significant gap between top universities in the United States and top universities in Japan. Similarly, within Japan, there is a considerable disparity between top universities in Tokyo and provincial universities in the countryside. Thus, even if the financial foundation of a few top universities were strengthened considerably, this might not be good news for universities as a whole.

Thirdly, there is criticism that, despite the considerable effort devoted to university evaluations, the results are not adequately disclosed and do not lead to substantial university reforms. This is also true, but Japan’s evaluation system is based on a point-deduction method. Even if universities receive high evaluations, this does not directly lead to increased budgets or more faculty positions. As a result, the process becomes merely formal. Faculty members spend significant effort on tasks whose purpose is unclear, leading to exhaustion and further diminishing the research and educational capabilities of universities.

In essence, while all these criticisms are valid, they stem from external issues of university organization rather than addressing the fundamental question of ‘What is a university?’ Therefore, although these are necessary improvements, they alone will not guide universities to a new stage. So, what holds the key to addressing the crisis tied to this fundamental question? I believe the perspective of the ‘university as a temporal entity’ is the key.

Above all, the decline in the quality of Japanese universities since the 2000s is largely due to the degradation of university teachers’ time. Statistical data support this claim. From the early 1990s to the late 2010s, over a quarter of a century, the time an average Japanese university faculty member spent on research each week decreased by about two-thirds, while the time spent on university administration and paperwork more than doubled. In other words, over the past few decades, Japanese university professors have increasingly moved away from research and have instead spent much of their time on university management, securing funds, writing applications and reports, conducting evaluations, dealing with compliance issues, and handling harassment cases. This is a suicidal trend for universities as a whole, no matter how essential each individual task may seem (Yoshimi, 2021: 256–66).

Today in Japan, universities often face criticism from industry, politicians, and the general public for things like ‘students complaining that classes are boring’ or ‘declining research capabilities’. However, from the perspective of university faculty, the current state of Japanese universities leaves them too busy to adequately prepare for classes. Additionally, young researchers have unstable career paths, making it difficult for them to focus on long-term research with peace of mind. The degradation of university faculty’s time becomes manifest as a decline in their educational and research capabilities.

From Supermarket to Coaching

So, how can we escape from this degradation of university time? Let’s consider this at three different levels: (1) the weekly timetable, (2) the annual academic calendar, and (3) the span of a lifetime. However, while the current university crisis is global, the three levels discussed here pertain significantly to issues unique to Japanese universities, differing in some respects from the situations in Western universities.

The first issue is at the level of the weekly timetable. In Japan, university students typically take 12 to 14 courses per week. The number of courses Japanese university students take in one semester is two to three times the international standard. Why is such a situation considered normal in Japanese universities? Fundamentally, it is because Japanese universities have developed not as places to generate new knowledge, but as places to systematically and efficiently absorb and apply advanced Western knowledge. Consequently, the Japanese education system has developed a structure that divides systematic knowledge into many segments for comprehensive acquisition.

However, university learning fundamentally differs from high school education. There is no need to cover all knowledge comprehensively; universities should enable students to deeply study the areas they wish to explore, develop questions, and continue to seek answers. For this purpose, the fragmentation of subjects is undesirable, and students should intensively focus on the topics they choose. However, as most Japanese university students attend 12 to 14 different classes per week, such deep learning is impossible. Students move from classroom to classroom to attend lectures and take notes during the class, but since each class meets only once a week, they forget what they have learned by the following week. Over four years of university, a student will have taken over 70 courses, and by graduation, they will likely have forgotten the courses they took in their first year.

I refer to this as the ‘supermarket-style’ education system in Japanese universities. Due to the fragmentation of subjects, the variety of courses that students can choose from in Japanese universities is extremely broad. At the same time, because there are so many courses overall, each faculty member has to handle a large number of courses, leaving them with little time to prepare detailed syllabi for each one. Consequently, at the beginning of the semester, students choose their courses from a colorful catalog of syllabi that provide only brief overviews of each course. They make their selections based on their interests or information from their peers. If a chosen course turns out to be different from what they expected, they can simply give up on earning the credits for that course. Due to the large number of courses available, each course typically carries only one or two credits, so dropping a course does not jeopardize their ability to graduate (Kariya and Yoshimi, 2020: 57–103; Yoshimi, 2016).

Is this really what university education should be? I have serious doubts. A university is fundamentally a place for intellectual encounters between motivated, excellent teachers and students. Such encounters cannot happen in a supermarket. To make universities such a place, Japanese university education needs to undergo a dramatic shift from ‘many and light’ to ‘few and heavy’. This means transitioning from a supermarket-style to a coaching-style education.

Specifically, the average number of credits per course should be increased from the current one or two to four or six, and each course should be offered two or three times a week, which is a common practice in Western universities. This teaching style is not at all unusual internationally, but it is extremely rare in Japanese higher education. Naturally, to make such a teaching format possible, it is essential to develop the currently underdeveloped systems of team teaching in Japanese universities.

The ‘Single-Track Age-Centric System’ in Japanese Education

Another predicament that Japanese universities have long been unable to overcome is the significant temporal discrepancy between Japan and the world. Japanese university students live according to a rhythm markedly different from the annual rhythm around the world. In Japan, the academic year is divided into two semesters, with the spring semester running from early April to August. Despite the intense heat in July, students attend classes until late July, take final exams, and write their term papers. Summer vacation at Japanese universities begins in August and lasts for about a month and a half. The fall semester starts at the end of September and continues until early February, with a winter break from the end of December to early January. Then, after the end of the fall semester, there is a spring break from mid February to late March.

This academic calendar has been a significant obstacle to the globalization of Japanese university education. First, while September admissions and May–June graduations are standard globally, Japan uniquely adheres to an April admission and March graduation system. This results in a six-month discrepancy that complicates the acceptance of international students and the dispatch of Japanese students abroad, necessitating the development of complex systems to manage this misalignment.

Second, from June to July is the season for summer programs, during which students from around the world gather at various universities to participate, fostering exchanges that serve as an introduction to studying abroad and building international networks. However, Japanese university students cannot participate in this introductory process as their spring semester extends until late July.

Third, summer vacation in Japan is relatively short. On the other hand, there are many short breaks throughout the academic year. In early May, there is a week-long break known as ‘Golden Week’. From October to November, there is often an autumn break that includes university festivals. There is a month-long winter break in the middle of the fall semester, and spring break starts in late February. Additionally, Japan has many public holidays besides Sundays. Overall, while many universities internationally have a solid three-month summer vacation, Japanese university students have frequent short breaks within the semester, leaving them with little real long-term vacation time.

This kind of academic calendar lacks clear demarcation. The distinction between periods of dedicated study and periods of play is not well defined. Consequently, Japanese university students end up studying and playing in a rather half-hearted manner throughout the year. If there were a solid three-month summer vacation, they could spend that time in ways completely different from their activities during the semester. This could include participating in overseas summer programs, traveling around the world, or engaging in long-term internship programs. The structure of Japanese university education makes such a shift in values difficult (Yoshimi, 2021: 150–82).

These issues with the academic calendar in Japanese universities are also related to the role universities play in people’s lives. In Japan, universities hold no greater significance than being a transitional phase between high school graduation and employment. This is evidenced by the remarkably low ratio of adult learners in Japanese universities, ranking almost at the bottom among 25 OECD countries. Japanese society is based on a ‘single-track age-centric system’, where a person’s position in society is often estimated based on their age and the examination score (‘Hensachi’) of the university for which they passed the entrance exam. In Japan, the ‘Hensachi’ of the university one gets into is highly valued, even in the employment process in one’s life, but what one learns at university is not given so much importance as ‘Hensachi’. Consequently, there is an extremely high interest in university entrance exams, but very little interest in the actual educational content of the universities.

As a result, students in a particular year at university tend to be composed almost exclusively of peers of the same age, leading to a high degree of homogeneity. Consequently, universities are often experienced as extensions of high school, where intergenerational communication is rare. In Japan, at the undergraduate level, there are not many international students, so there is often not much exposure to diversity. Ultimately, the imagination needed to break through Japan’s deeply ingrained age-centric society and its vertically-oriented organizational structures has its limits.

Ideally, universities should offer opportunities for multiple entries throughout a multistage life, enabling learning that facilitates career changes. Personally, I believe Japan should aim for a society where it’s normal to enter university three times in one’s life. The first time would be around the current age of 18 to 20, when young people graduate from high school and become university students. The second time would be in one’s 30s to 40s, after gaining work experience and deciding whether to advance into management roles or explore different paths. If choosing the latter, re-entering university allows the occasion for a gear change. The third time would be around 60 years old, approaching retirement age. However, given that people today often remain active well into their late 70s, it’s still too early to retire. Therefore, there should be a significant number of individuals looking to spend the remaining 20 or so years of their lives challenging themselves in new and different fields, for whom university can serve as a beneficial opportunity for a gear change (Yoshimi, 2021: 187–207).

Are Universities in Japan Not Really Universities?

The difficulties faced by Japanese universities, as outlined above, fundamentally stem from a longstanding lack of consistent understanding of ‘what universities are’ in Japan. Universities originated as communities of learning for itinerant teachers and students. In essence, at the core of university ‘freedom’ lies ‘freedom of movement’, which has historically supported ‘university autonomy’. This is why the EU today promotes initiatives like the Erasmus Project and the Bologna Process to revive this ‘freedom of movement’ among European universities. However, such concepts of universities never took root in Japanese society.

The usage of ‘Daigaku’ (university) in Japan dates back to ancient times, established during the early 8th century under the Ritsuryō state system as educational institutions for training national bureaucrats. This predates the birth of ‘universities’ in Europe by a considerable margin. The concept was inspired by similar institutions in Han Dynasty China, where these educational establishments operated as residential institutions teaching Confucianism, mathematics, Chinese literature (Hanwen), and later, law. Graduates were dispatched to provincial capitals as officials. Similar educational institutions influenced by ancient China are also confirmed to have existed in ancient Korea.

In Japan, since the medieval period, such ancient ‘Daigaku’ declined. In the early modern period, ‘Daigaku’ remained as the title ‘Hayashi Daigaku-no-kami’, a position within the Tokugawa shogunate responsible for academic affairs. However, the school overseen by the Hayashi family was called the ‘Shōheizaka Academy’ and did not bear the name ‘Daigaku’. When the Meiji Restoration occurred in 1868, the Meiji government, with its slogan of ‘restoration of Ritsuryõ rule’ aiming to revive the ancient order, adopted the term ‘Daigaku’, an educational institution of ancient Japan, as the translation for the Western concept of ‘university’. The problem, however, is that the ancient Japanese ‘Daigaku’ and the ‘university’ that developed in medieval Europe were fundamentally different.

The university originally started as a community of learning formed by itinerant teachers and students. It was not established by the state as an institution for training bureaucrats. In contrast, the concept of ‘Daigaku’ in Japan evolved based on the latter model. The Meiji state’s equating of the Western ‘university’ with the Japanese ‘Daigaku’ stemmed from the belief that Westernization was synonymous with civilization, rather than from an understanding of the European university concept. In fact, educational institutions more closely resembling the medieval European universities in Japan from the Edo to the Meiji periods would be the ‘Juku’ and ‘Shoin’. For instance, Yoshida Shōin’s Shōka Sonjuku, Ogata Kōan’s Tekijuku, Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Keio Gijuku were all places where young samurai traveled from various domains to Edo or Osaka to gather around renowned teachers and study. Some of these ‘Juku’, like Keio Gijuku University, later evolved into ‘Daigaku’ (Yoshimi, 2020: 1–11).

Freedom of Movement and Fostering Global Citizens

If we consider the fundamental freedom of universities to be the ‘freedom of movement’, we must question what ‘movement’ means today. In envisioning the future of post-university education, we need to rethink ‘movement’ from three dimensions.

First, in the future university, ‘movement’ will be both global and local. It goes without saying that universities are hubs of global mobility. Students and teachers find themselves within global networks. However, what will be questioned in the 21st century is how universities as global hubs can also become local hubs. The knowledge generated by university scholars must be utilized within local communities, nations, and regional systems. Just as medieval universities nurtured Europeans and modern universities aimed to cultivate national elites, the future university’s goal is to nurture ‘global citizens’. However, these global citizens must also be local citizens.

Second, the ‘movements’ in future universities will be both geographical and virtual. Within the global information network, universities will become hubs for the daily virtual exchanges. Virtual movements and geographical movements will increasingly become two sides of the same coin in future university activities. In this context, the mechanism for moving physically, traveling, and studying abroad will be more important for teachers and students. In the borderless activities within the global information networks, universities cannot compete with global corporations. However, universities exist within a much more relaxed timeframe, allowing students and teachers to move between different regions over periods of six months to several years. Recently, the challenge of Minerva University has garnered global attention because it not only lacks a physical campus but also has dormitories in various cities around the world, encouraging students to travel between these cities and learn through ‘field work’ in each city. Their goal is the revival of the traveling university.

Third, the movement usually has geographical and social dimensions, and these two aspects are deeply intertwined. Since ancient times, people have often traveled to temporarily detach themselves from the society to which they belonged. Wanderers do not belong to a specific community. The communities that such wandering intellectuals built in various cities are the origin of universities. Therefore, the ‘movement’ that future universities will promote and enable will not only be geographical or virtual but also foster social mobility. Japanese society is extremely vertically integrated, with relatively few opportunities for horizontal movement leading to new social statuses. This lack of fluidity has contributed to Japan’s economic decline over the past 30 years. If future universities can become a driving force for horizontal movements beyond borders, changing the structure of social careers in Japan, this could lead to a profound structural transformation of Japanese society.

So, who exactly will this future university, embodying this new ‘freedom of movement’, nurture and how? In conclusion, the future post-university will cultivate ‘global citizens’ moving locally/globally, physically/virtually, and socially/geographically. Just as medieval Western universities nurtured intellectual ‘Europeans’ within the Christian world, and modern universities nurtured intellectual ‘nationals’ to lead their respective countries, the mission of the post-university is to nurture global citizens who will lead future global society.

But how will this be achieved? Here, we must return to the fundamental question of what universities are. Since the medieval period, over nearly a thousand years, university learning has always been a complex of two types of knowledge. On the one hand, there is useful knowledge, which in medieval universities included theology, law, and medicine, and in modern universities ranges from law and marketing to engineering and agriculture, indicating appropriate technologies and methods for specific purposes. On the other hand, the essential elements for universities lies in the knowledge of liberty, which includes philosophy, literature, history, mathematics, basic sciences, anthropology, etc. Immanuel Kant referred to the former as the higher faculties and the latter as the lower faculties, defending the latter. John Henry Newman called the former servile knowledge and the latter liberal knowledge. The important point is that university learning has always been a combination of these two dimensions of knowledge, and this duality will remain unchanged in the future university.

Therefore, what I must emphasize here is the importance of defining what constitutes ‘useful knowledge’ and ‘liberal knowledge’ in nurturing global citizens to lead future global society. The definition of the former is already clear. From the 21st century onwards, global society will undoubtedly continue to face enormous risks. Climate change, food crises, environmental destruction, nuclear weapons, robotic weapons, AI, information security, racial discrimination, wars, refugees, super-aging populations – these are the global challenges humanity will face. The knowledge that addresses these global issues and brings us closer to solutions is the ‘useful knowledge’ that future universities will provide.

On the other hand, what is the ‘liberal knowledge’ that future universities will provide? In medieval universities, the ‘liberal arts’ consisted of the seven knowledges: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. In modern universities, the core of the ‘liberal knowledge’ was the humanities, with philosophy, history, and literature at its center; from the 19th century onwards, social sciences such as economics, sociology, and anthropology were added. Based on these premises, what will be the human knowledge in post-universities from the 21st century onwards that questions global society and considers the values and purposes people should share? The answer is still somewhat unclear, but it is evident that knowledge striving for ‘freedom’ on a global scale, such as ‘global philosophy’, ‘global history’, and ‘global literature’, will be essential. Merely possessing ‘useful knowledge’ to solve global challenges will cause us to lose our fundamental base for the university. Rather, the fate of post-universities depends on whether they can generate the ‘liberal knowledge’ that allows us to think about the values and purposes that the future global society can share.