Japan Graduate Research Articles

Feasibility of an Online Mindfulness-Based Program for Mothers of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Graduates in Japan

Feasibility of an Online Mindfulness-Based Program for Mothers of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Graduates in Japan

Postgraduate Developments Among Perianesthesia-Trained Nursing Graduates in Japan: A Cross-Sectional Survey

PurposeTo elucidate the postgraduation situation of those who have completed a perianesthesia nurse (PAN) educational course offered in master’s degree programs in Japan. DesignThis cross-sectional study used an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. MethodsOf the 42 individuals who completed a PAN educational course offered in master’s degree programs in Japan by March 2021, 41 were targeted, excluding the author of this study. The questionnaire was distributed by mail between November 20, 2021, and January 14, 2022, and the participants were asked to return the completed questionnaire by mail. Those working as PANs were asked about their work content, work satisfaction, and thoughts on their prospects in the perianesthesia nursing field. Those not working as a PAN were asked about their future intentions to do so. FindingsThe response rate was 95.1% (39/41). PANs are involved in various perianesthesia tasks, and there were no respondents who answered “No” to the question of whether they were glad to have become a PAN. However, of those working as PANs, only 16 (53.3%) indicated that they would like to continue working in that role. Few respondents (n = 3; 10.0%) considered future PAN prospects to be “good,” while eight (26.7%) respondents answered “poor,” and many (n = 19; 63.3%) stated “neither.” ConclusionsUnder the current situation, PANs in Japan do not necessarily have a positive outlook for the future, the causes for which must be analyzed to make the necessary improvements.

Factors associated with regional retention of physicians: a cross-sectional online survey of medical students and graduates in Japan

BackgroundPhysician shortage and maldistribution is an urgent health policy issue requiring resolution. Determination of factors associated with regional retention and development of effective policy interventions will help to solve this issue. The purpose of the present study was to identify factors associated with regional retention and discuss their policy implications.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional online survey from February to March of 2022 for graduates from regional quotas (special quotas for medical schools to select students engaged in community medicine) and Jichi Medical University (JMU) and students at 10 medical schools including JMU. Completed surveys were obtained from 375 graduates and 1153 students. Questions included intention to continue to work in their home prefecture in the future, as well as background information and potential factors associated with regional retention. In the analyses, regional quotas and JMU were referred to as community medicine-oriented programs and schools (CMPS). We performed logistic regression analyses to identify factors associated with regional retention.ResultsAmong the students, scholarship-bonded obligatory service, satisfaction with current life, intention to belong to ikyoku (a traditional physician allocation/training system in Japanese medical schools), and interest in general practice/family medicine were significantly positively associated with regional retention. Among the graduates, satisfaction with training environment, intention to belong to ikyoku, and recommending their program to high school students were significantly positively associated with regional retention. For students of CMPS, satisfaction with the career development program was positively associated with future regional retention. For graduates, this association was observed only in the crude analysis.ConclusionsIn addition to known factors such as interest in general practice/family medicine, intention to belong to ikyoku had a substantial impact on regional retention. The present results suggest that the career support system represented by ikyoku as well as a career development program are of potential importance for increasing regional retention through the mechanisms of a sense of belonging and a life-long education system. These findings provide useful information for the development of further policy interventions that interweave traditional and new systems to maximize their effectiveness.

Changes in doctoral graduates' employment and doctoral students' views of their future career in Japan in 2012–2018

AbstractThis study investigates the employment landscape and career expectations of doctoral graduates in Japan through the analysis of three national surveys conducted in 2012, 2015 and 2018. The research explores the changing factors influencing graduates' employment destinations during this period, encompassing changes by discipline and proposing strategies to address challenges faced by these graduates. Unlike previous studies, which predominantly focussed on analysing data and interviewing students, this research offers both descriptive insights and analytical perspectives on Japanese doctoral education. Key findings include an increase in doctoral graduates employed in universities and the private sector, while academia employment varies by discipline. Humanities exhibit the highest academic employment, while engineering shows diverse fluctuations. Additionally, career expectations shift, with declining interest in tenure positions and growing inclination towards non‐academic paths. The study identifies challenges stemming from shifting academic appeal, skill mismatches, sector concentration and field‐specific hurdles, providing insights into global trends while emphasizing Japan's unique complexities.

The effectiveness of vocational secondary education on entry‐level job outcomes in Japan: Safety net for low‐educated youth in a vocationally weak educational system

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to analyze the sociodemographic compositions and labor market entry of low‐educated youth in Japan. The paper specifically focuses on whether vocational education provides a safety net for labor market insecurities during an era of educational expansion. While past literature has shown that vocational education contributes to occupationally specific skills and a smooth transition from school to work, less is known about its effectiveness when low‐educated youth become a minority group. The case of Japan provides a unique perspective, given its historically low youth unemployment rate and strong connections between schools and employers, despite its academically oriented high school education system. The 2015 Social Stratification and Social Mobility Survey in Japan is used to evaluate trends in vocational education and their impact on employment. The key variables under examination are entry‐level job outcomes. The results show that, over the past decades, high school graduates in Japan have become a more disadvantaged group than university graduates. Among high school graduates, those from general schools tend to have more advantageous sociodemographic backgrounds than their counterparts from vocational schools. Despite the limitations, vocational high school graduates have been better rewarded in the transition to work throughout recent decades. Furthermore, the labor market premium for vocational school graduates remains stable even after accounting for the influence of school networks. Sensitivity analysis confirms the robustness of these effects. The implications of the findings are discussed within the context of the skill formation regime in Japan.

The effect of student loans on college enrollment: Evidence from municipality panel data in Japan

This study examines whether the criteria expansion for student loan eligibility promotes the college enrollment of high school graduates in Japan. In 1999, the Japan Student Services Organization revised the eligibility criteria of the student loan system based on household earnings. Before the revision, the maximum allowable earnings for student loan applications differed across regions; some region’s had lower criteria than others. After the revision, the criteria for regions with lower maximum allowable earnings were adjusted upwards to match regions with higher ones. We conducted a difference-in-differences estimation by using municipal panel data from 1998 to 2003. We found that the expansion of eligibility for student loans improved the male college enrollment rate by around 0.5 to 0.7% points, while female enrollment was less sensitive to the expansion of student loan eligibility. The impact of the student loan eligibility expansion is larger for low income areas.

Results of physician licence examination and scholarship contract compliance by the graduates of regional quotas in Japanese medical schools: a nationwide cross-sectional survey

ObjectivesResponding to the serious shortage of physicians in rural areas, the Japanese government has aggressively increased the number of entrants to medical schools since 2008, mostly as a chiikiwaku, entrants...

Hiring New Graduates in Japan and “Character”

In Japan, the main recruitment method is hiring of new school graduates. Japanese companies attach importance to “character” when hiring new graduates. Why is “character” so important? This study aims to provide a hypothesis. The reason of the overriding importance attached to “character” in new graduate recruitment is the fact that Japanese companies see new graduates as human resources who can be developed as their companions to work with for the long term. “Character” has two aspects: character as a driving force for growth and character as a driving force for development. Skill can be learned later and anyone can acquire knowledge. However, character as a driving force for growth cannot be developed in a short time. Japanese companies develop new graduates primarily through OJT (On the Job Training). This requires hard work. Hence, new graduates should make their superiors and seniors “feel willing to develop them” even at the cost of time.Repositioning Vol.1(1) 2016: 53-62

Why has wage inequality evolved so differently between Japan and the US? The role of the supply of college-educated workers

Why has wage inequality not changed in Japan while it has secularly increased in the US over the last few decades? Pointing to the difference in the trends of the college wage premium in the two countries as a proximate cause, this study assesses the importance of the supply factor as a determinant of the college wage premium. The wage differential between college and high-school graduates decreased slightly from 0.35 to 0.34 log point in Japan, while it increased from 0.43 to 0.65 log point in the US between 1986 and 2008. During this period, the number of college graduates grew twice as fast in Japan as in the US. Estimations of labor demands for different educational backgrounds and simulations based on counterfactual supply trends reveal that the more rapid increase of college graduates in Japan than in the US explains about 60% of these contrasting trends. The difference in post-war fertility trends largely explains the difference in the supply increase of college graduates between the two countries.

A study on the survey for actual condition of local junior college graduates in Japan

In this study, the following three things became clear by analyzing the results of a survey conducted among the graduates of a Junior College in Japan. Firstly, there is a difference between students who ask for advice from teachers and students who do not. It was found that the former students have a higher expectation for the college and higher motivation. This result shows us that going to professors for advice gives students good effects improved on their school lives. Secondly, there is a difference between students who have any achieved certificates and students who do not. It was found that the former students think to keep pursue learning even after graduation. It is considered that those students are strongly aware of the necessity to pursue their future careers or the importance of learning by pursuing certificates. Thirdly, the method of entrance to the university does not make any difference to students. Perhaps this means the students who pursue their careers gain satisfaction from their school lives, and can keep learning after graduation.

Learning Curve for Collective Behavior of Zero-Intelligence Agents in Successive Job-Hunting Processes with a Diversity of Jaynes-Shannon’s MaxEnt Principle

Inspired by the unsupervised learning or self-organization in the machine learning context, here we attempt to draw ‘learning curve’ for the collective behavior of job-seeking ‘zero-intelligence’ labors in successive job-hunting processes. Our labor market is supposed to be opened especially for university graduates in Japan, where the students have several successive chances n = 0, 1, 2, ⋯ to obtain their positions within an academic (business) year. In this sense, the ‘cumulative unemployment rate’ in our model system is regarded as an error-measurement in the collective intelligence of students, and the job-hunting stage n-dependence of the error constructs a learning curve. In our simple toy-model of probabilistic labor market, the diversity of students’ behavior is built-in by means of the Jaynes-Shannon’s MaxEnt (Maximum Entropy) principle. Then, we discuss the speed of convergence for the error-measurement, where we consider a scenario in which the students do not use any information about the result of job-hunting processes in the previous stage. Our approach enables us to examine the existence of the condition on which macroscopic quantity, say, ‘stage-wise unemployment rate’ becomes ‘scale-invariant’ in the sense that it does not depend on the job-hunting stage n. From the macroscopic view point, the problem could be regarded as a human resource allocation.

Association between perception of dentist oversupply and expectations of dentistry: a survey of dental graduates in Japan

The perception that there is a surplus of dentists may be an opportunity to explore attractive career options in dentistry in Japan. A self-administered questionnaire was mailed to 2,114 graduates of a private dental school in Japan. We asked about the perception of oversupply, rated by a visual analogue scale, work environment factors, potential areas of dentistry and necessary medical subjects for their dental practice. The association of a strong perception of dentist oversupply with work environment factors, dental areas and medical subjects was examined by multivariate logistic regression analyses. The response rate was 66%, and data from 1,203 community dentists were analysed. Most respondents (76%) perceived either a strong or very strong surplus of dentists. A very strong perception was significantly associated with work environment factors, including practising in large cities and earning the second lowest of four levels of annual income, but no further associations were found with either the number of patients treated or with the other two ranges of income. This perception was negatively associated with the number of necessary medical subjects, specifically otorhinolaryngology, but no significant association was seen with the number of potential areas of dentistry. The negative correlation between the aspiration to acquire medical knowledge and the perception of dentist oversupply under the circumstance of the possibly excessive perception among community dentists invites further research on the benefits of teaching oral medicine to graduate entry students to build future working satisfaction.

Competence development as perceived by degree and non-degree graduates in Japan: A longitudinal study

A degree programme is believed to prepare graduates with a higher level of competence than their diploma counterparts. However, there have been inconsistent findings reported as to whether or not degree-graduates outperformed those who take diplomas. This study aimed to identify graduates' perceptions of competence development in their first year of employment, and to compare the competence levels of graduates with different educational backgrounds. This study adopted a longitudinal design. This study has been performed in five hospitals in Japan. 122 Japanese graduates participated in this study. The self-assessed competence of the graduates was collected in the 3rd, 6th, 9th, and 12th months of their employment using a survey method. The data were analysed using a linear mixed model. The results suggested that the graduates perceived their competence to be rapidly growing during the first half of the graduate year, and slowly later. The results also indicated that the graduates' perception of their competence showed a significant variation. The most striking finding of the study was that, on average, the non-degree graduates rated their competence higher than their degree counterparts. The current university orientation on emphasising intellectual and theoretical components of education, with less focus on practical components might have led to the development of lower competence among the BN graduates. A fine balance between theoretical and practical components needs to be established in a university curriculum.

“Where Do They Belong in the Job Markets?” Emerging Career Issues of Public Policy Program Graduates in Japan

The emergence of Japanese professional schools began in 2003 as part of the government-led university education reform. As the newly launched public policy schools continue to produce policy professionals each year, finding career opportunities for prospective graduates has become an important institutional agenda. This paper attempts to clarify critical issues currently faced by Japanese public policy schools and their graduates, particularly from the job placement and career development perspectives, and seek potential remedies for the issues raised through comparative learning based on the distinct history, characteristics, and environments surrounding policy schools in the US and Japan.

Training the nation’s elites: National–private sector differences in Japanese university education

I examine the relationship between university prestige and socioeconomic achievement in Japan. I generate a set of hypotheses based on human capital and screening models of education, and test these using a 1995 cross-sectional dataset. I find that university prestige significantly improves socioeconomic achievement among male university graduates in Japan. I also find that national university graduates have higher rates of return to their university education, and are more likely to be employed in higher prestige occupations than are private university graduates. My findings lend support to the ‘elite’ view of investments in human capital proposed by Becker (1993), under which higher ability individuals (in this case national university graduates) have more to gain from university education than do lower ability individuals. I find little support for the screening model of education.

Does examination hell pay off ? A cost–benefit analysis of “ ronin” and college education in Japan

College-bound students in Japan undergo a process of intense preparation known as examination hell. An extreme manifestation of examination hell is the ronin phenomenon. Typically 30% of students choose the ronin option under which they spend years in addition to high school preparing for the next year's college entrance examinations. Using the mean scores of the entrance examinations as a measure of college quality, I find that college quality significantly improves the internal rate of return ( IRR) to college education among the sample of male graduates in Japan. Ronin increases earnings indirectly by improving the quality of the college attended. I also show that the IRR with respect to ronin is one of diminishing returns. On average, the number of ronin years which maximizes the IRR is found to be somewhere between 1 and 2 years.

The importance of networks in the market for university graduates in Japan: a longitudinal analysis of hiring patterns

This study examines the extent to which the transition from university education to work is characterised by persistent hiring flows between university faculties and employers, rather than being characterised by an open market process. More than half of all hires may be attributed to persistence in hiring by employers from specific faculties. Persistence appears to be related to the screening of potential employees and to the assurance of supply. Persistence is also stronger in hiring from faculties with higher percentages of male graduates, supporting the view that investment in employment ties rises with the expected tenure of the hired employee.

Japan's graduate university matures

The long-standing concern in Japan about the shortage of indigenous PhDs will be partly met by the graduate university about to graduate its first cohort of students.

Changes in the structure of wages: The United States vs Japan

This paper examines changes in wage differentials by educational attainment and experience in the United States and Japan since the early 1970s. While educational earnings differentials have expanded dramatically in the United States in the 1980s, the college wage premium has increased only slightly in Japan. In contrast to the large expansion in experience differentials for high school males in the United States, the wages of male new entrants have risen relative to more experienced workers for both high school and college graduates in Japan from 1979 to 1987. Macroeconomic factors (increased openness, trade deficits, and labor market slack) and changes in institutional structures (the decline in unionization) are likely to have amplified each other in contributing to a tremendous decline in real and relative earnings of young less-skilled males in the United States in the 1980s. We further find that a sharp deceleration in the rate of growth of college graduates as a fraction of the labor force in the United States helps account for the much larger increase in the college wage premium in the United States than in Japan in the 1980s.

NETWORKING

Women Managers in Japan In the Spring 1988 issue of the California Management Review is an article on “Hiring Women Managers in Japan: An Alternative for Foreign Employers” by Paul Lansing and Kathryn Ready. The authors argue that there is an increasing pool of college‐educated women in Japan who, if given the opportunity, are prepared to take on managerial positions in Japanese business. Due to the difficulties foreign firms face in hiring Japanese male graduates in Japan, it seems appropriate that foreign firms seriously consider a managerial strategy to encourage qualified female employees as a means of obtaining local managers in Japan. The legal environment has created a labour force that is ripe for change. Innovative firms stand to gain by taking actions to accord women equal opportunities in recruitment, hiring and promotion. This extends beyond the “make efforts” dictum of the new Equal Employment Opportunity law. While this strategy is not without risk, the potential return seems to the authors to be well worth the risk.