The Resilience of Japan’s Private Universities

Abstract

This chapter returns to the dire predictions made in the early 2000s for the future of private higher education in Japan and finds that, while individual examples can be found on a micro level which support them, on a macro scale the evidence almost all points in the opposite direction. The number of private universities, students in private universities, the proportion of students going to private universities, full-time academic staff, revenue from student fees, and government subsidies are all greater and larger in 2018 than they were in 2004. The value of a university credential can be argued to have improved rather than to have been devalued. The development of alternative markets and modes of operation have been much more muted than predicted. Finally, predictions of the number of universities which would go bankrupt have proven spectacularly inaccurate. This chapter not only outlines these trends but also explains some of the reasons for them at the macro level. The final section of the chapter examines some of the key actions which have allowed private universities to survive the last fifteen years. It suggests that the power of various actors to contend with the macro forces in the early 2000s was greatly underestimated. It may well have been the dominant theoretical assumptions which commentators and academics brought to their analysis in the early 2000s which explains why their predictions for private higher education have not come to pass.