Fostering global human resources seems all the rage these days and several Japanese universities are jumping in, opening their doors to foreign students who aren't proficient in Japanese in a bid to snatch top-class talent from around the world.
While the institutions prepare to make their programs attractive to foreign students, university officials say the private sector should also open up so these graduates will stay in Japan and embark on solid career paths.
Under the Global 30 project initiated by the education ministry last year, by the end of fiscal 2013 more than 130 undergraduate and graduate courses conducted completely in English will be launched at 13 universities acting as Japan's "global education hubs."
The schools, selected by the education ministry, include the University of Tokyo and Waseda, Keio, Meiji and Nagoya universities. Global 30 is one of the measures launched to achieve a goal set out in 2008 by then Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to attract 300,000 foreign students a year by 2020.
Through this project alone, the number of foreign students at the 13 universities should reach 50,000 by fiscal 2020, a ministry report says. Another aim of Global 30 is to reverse the decline in Japanese studying abroad, raising it to 10,000 from 4,000 now.
The program will give each university subsidies of between ¥200 million and ¥400 million a year until fiscal 2013, and they are expected to make great strides in becoming more international.
Efforts include establishing at least one "taught-in-English" course in both the undergraduate and graduate levels, setting up one-stop information offices overseas, providing foreign students opportunities to learn Japanese language and culture, and increasing the number of foreign teachers.
"This is a big chance," said Yoshihito Watanabe, vice president of Nagoya University. "We had to internationalize regardless of the launch of Global 30. But now, with the funds from the government, we can take active steps" to make Japanese campuses more international.
Most of the universities have spent the last year preparing, so the majority of the new courses are scheduled to kick off this fall and over the next two academic years.
For example, Waseda University opened four undergraduate and five graduate English-only courses Tuesday and is scheduled to open another undergraduate course in 2011 and a graduate course in 2012.
Nagoya University is scheduled to start five undergraduate and six graduate courses in October 2011, aiming to raise its foreign enrollment, which was 1,214 in 2008, to 3,000 by the end of fiscal 2020.
Faculty members are promoting the school and recruiting students overseas, including in the United States, Europe, Australia, Mongolia and Singapore, visiting top high schools and setting up booths at major international education events, Watanabe said.
While the government and the universities may have high hopes for luring top-class foreign talent, the project, there are plenty of hurdles, experts say.
One concern is whether the idea is truly realistic.
"We are now doing the best we can. . . . Some faculty question whether foreign students will actually choose to study in a country where English is not the first language," Watanabe said. "But we will not accept students who aren't qualified just so we can fill the seats we have prepared."
Another university official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the schools will bear up even if only about 20 percent of the seats are filled the first year.
"The important thing is to provide high-quality education and build up its reputation. Then, hopefully, many (top-class) students will come forward through word of mouth," the official said.
Etsuko Katsu, vice president of Meiji University, said one of the keys to attracting foreign students is to provide something extra in the curriculum and to put an emphasis on Japan.
As an attempt, Meiji is scheduled to start an undergraduate course next year on modern Japanese culture, focusing on manga, "anime," video games and other aspects of the "Cool Japan" fad the government has been promoting overseas.
Katsu also stressed that the ultimate goal of the plan is to actually improve the level of Japanese research, not foreign enrollment. By raising the academic level, many first-class students will come naturally, she said.
Meanwhile, some critics have raised doubts about whether the private sector, which is where the demand for global students is coming from, will have jobs ready for them.
Shigeharu Kato, deputy director general of the Higher Education Bureau at the education ministry, said at a joint forum last month in Tokyo that it is critical to collaborate with the private sector.
"Cooperation between universities and business is vital" to Global 30's end results, Kato said.
The Global 30 University-Business Joint Forum brought together officials from the education and economy ministries, universities and corporations to exchange views on the globalization of higher education in Japan.
Executives from Rakuten Inc. and Sony Corp. at the forum expressed a strong desire to recruit first-class international students, but observers say most companies are still reluctant to follow suit.
Figures also show that there aren't enough jobs for foreign students.
According to a 2007 survey by the Japan Students Service Organization of privately funded international students attending Japanese universities, 61.3 percent said they would like to get a job in Japan. But only 30.6 percent of all foreign students who graduated in 2007 said they found a job in this country.
In the same year, 96.3 percent of Japanese undergraduate students looking for a job secured employment, according to the labor ministry.
"Top executives at large corporations say they will hire foreign students without Japanese-language proficiency, only if they are fluent in English and have excelled at the academic level. But in reality, they don't," said Watanabe of Nagoya University. "When such (top-class) students apply, the personnel division says they should have scored at least Level 2 on the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in order to have smooth communications."
Although all 13 schools will be offering Japanese classes for international students, Japanese corporations must realize they have to change their attitude and be more flexible about hiring foreign talent, Meiji University's Katsu said.
"(Japanese) corporations have to change. Unless the whole society changes, Japan can't survive in the globalized world," she said.
On top of these challenges, Global 30 is already suffering from a serious problem in its first year. Funding for the project was cut by around 20 percent through the "shiwake" budget screening process started last year by the Democratic Party of Japan-led government.
Another 17 core universities are supposed to be selected by 2013 to bring the total to 30, as the name of the project says, but it is likely to remain at 13 because of budget cuts, said Kazuki Fukuda, deputy director of the education ministry's Higher Education Bureau.
Watanabe said the budget cut is having a big impact but that Nagoya University will stick to its original plan.
"There are many factors in accepting foreign students. It is true that we want talented students from overseas, but I also hope the presence of ambitious and aggressive students will stimulate Japanese students, who tend to be inward-looking," he said, pointing out that fewer Japanese students are seeking to study overseas.
"By increasing the number of such foreign students (on campus), domestic students are forced to use English, and through creating (an international) environment, I think Japanese students will turn their eyes to the outside world," he said.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100923f1.html
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Thursday, September 09, 2010
Japan's Globalization Project Stalls as Some Criticize Focus on Elite Universities
As Japan watchers warn that the island nation is becoming more insular, the government's newest bid to internationalize Japan's stuffy higher-education system—the misnamed Global 30—is off to a wobbly start.
The goal was to recruit 30 universities and support their internationalization efforts. Beginning last year on a 3.2-billion-yen, or about $38-million, budget, the project aims to significantly increase the number of foreign students in the country and Japanese students studying abroad.
But the education ministry's tough selection criteria mean that just 13 elite universities have been chosen so far. Government cuts have already shaved up to 30 percent from the budget allocated to each institution. And the remaining 17 spots open to universities are unlikely to be filled, according to two administrators at universities in the exclusive club.
"It's disappointing," says Go Yoshida, a spokesman for the Office of International Strategic Planning at Nagoya University, one of the 13 selectees. "Quite honestly, Japan is late in the game of globalization in higher education. But the government's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing."
The stakes for this island nation are high. After more than two decades and billions of yen in scholarships, fewer than 4 percent of Japan's university students come from abroad—133,000, well below China, with 223,000, and the United States with 672,000. Just 5 percent of its 353,000 university teachers are foreign, according to ministry of education statistics. Most of those teach English.
At the opposite end of the education pendulum, students here are increasingly staying home: Japanese undergraduate enrollment in American universities has plummeted by more than half since 2000, estimates the ministry. Japanese student enrollment in European institutions is also down.
"Frankly, in my view Japan is going backwards," says Ian de Stains, executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, and one of many observers who believe that despite government rhetoric about internationalization, Japan is becoming more isolationist. "The big danger is that Japan will lose touch and fail to compete globally."
South Korea, with less than half Japan's population, sends twice as many students to the United States. At some American universities, such as Cornell, the number of Japanese students is behind not just the number from China, India, and South Korea, but even from Thailand and tiny Singapore. "The drop is without precedent," says Mark Selden, a senior fellow at Cornell's East Asia program.
Global 30 is supposed to partly remedy those ills, helping Japan reach a government goal of 300,000 foreign students by 2020, while sending the same number of Japanese students abroad.
Participating universities receive an annual grant of 200-400 million yen (between $2.4-million and $4.8-million) annually for five years to employ foreign faculty members and English-speaking support staff, and to create new all-English undergraduate courses. Each university is also required to set up offices outside Japan, both to recruit locally and help Japanese students study in other countries.
Japan's education ministry hopes that its modest commitment will help transform the country's academic landscape by luring more international students and generating more collaboration between foreign and Japanese professors.
"We think those universities will set an example for other colleges by leading with good practice," says Shigeharu Kato, deputy director of the Higher Education Bureau at the ministry. "This practice will then diffuse to other colleges around the country."
With Japan's population falling and dozens of private colleges facing bankruptcy, the government has little choice but to look beyond the country's borders. Education specialists agree that tripling the intake of foreign students will expose their Japanese counterparts to the world, and could help create a cadre of foreign academics who studied in Japan.
But while praising the Global 30 program, some are questioning its focus on elite universities. Priority was given to large institutions with proven research capacity, such as the University of Tokyo and the private Waseda University, says Akiyoshi Yonezawa, an associate professor at the Center for the Advancement of Higher Education in Tohoku University—another of the 13 selected institutions.
Tough Demands
"Smaller and midsized institutions, despite satisfying many of the strong international criteria, were eliminated from the selection process," he says. He adds that some of the country's best universities, such as the Tokyo Institute of Technology, were driven away from the program by its demands, which included raising the percentage of international students to 20 percent and the share of international professors to 10 percent by 2020.
Paul Snowden, dean of Waseda's School of International Liberal Studies, says that institutions that have achieved success attracting international students should have been rewarded for their efforts but instead were disqualified for having already met the ministry's goals.
Half of the students at Mr. Snowden's institution are from abroad, he says. But despite this accomplishment, three other Waseda faculties—the departments of political science; economics, science, and engineering; and social sciences — were selected for the Global 30.
"It was flattering, but disappointing, that basically our curriculum had been imitated by the ministry and disseminated to other places, but we weren't allowed any of the money," Mr. Snowden says.
He questions whether the ratio the School of International Liberal Studies has achieved can be replicated by others. "I'm pretty sure that extreme case is not going to be achieved by more than a handful of institutions in Japan, though."
Despite the concerns about the new program, Mr. Kato of the education ministry says Global 30 is now taking off and is "almost at cruising altitude." And there are some signs to support that.
Nagoya University's Mr. Yoshida says the roughly $3.5-million it received has helped the institution raise its intake of foreign undergraduate and graduate students by 170, and open new offices in Germany and Uzbekistan.
Yet the colleges and the ministry have been frustrated by cost cutting ordered by the Democratic Party of Japan government, which took power last year just after Global 30 was approved. Nagoya's government support, for example, will shrink by 27 percent in its next fiscal year, which starts in April. "We're just starting to launch this and the cuts have come. And we fear more are due," says Mr. Yoshida.
Some believe that the government may be switching priorities to a separate effort called Campus Asia, which is intended to harmonize China, Japan, and South Korea's colleges and ultimately keep more students in the region. A working group from each of the countries is set to meet in China this year, with the project officially starting in April.
Little Fiscal Legroom
With the worst public debt in the industrialized world—900 trillion yen, or $10.6-trillion—Japan has much less fiscal legroom than its competitors. That is likely to mean careful scrutiny of all education spending and a demand that colleges and the education ministry deliver more bang for the government's buck.
Even if this year's cuts were reversed and the government met its financial commitments to Global 30, Mr. Yonezawa of Tohoku University and others doubt that the student targets are attainable without major reform outside the education system. "It is impossible to achieve this sort of internationalization only with Global 30," he says, adding that Japan needs to focus on its second- and third-tier colleges. He also urges major changes in the labor markets and among Japan's conservative companies to give foreign graduates an incentive to stay and work in the country.
Despite these looming issues, Waseda's Mr. Snowden is among many who believe that Japan is still in the race. "Japan is indeed late in the game. But with much interest from Korea and China, I think it can find a new role as an international education base" within the region.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Slow-Start-for-Japans/124346/
The goal was to recruit 30 universities and support their internationalization efforts. Beginning last year on a 3.2-billion-yen, or about $38-million, budget, the project aims to significantly increase the number of foreign students in the country and Japanese students studying abroad.
But the education ministry's tough selection criteria mean that just 13 elite universities have been chosen so far. Government cuts have already shaved up to 30 percent from the budget allocated to each institution. And the remaining 17 spots open to universities are unlikely to be filled, according to two administrators at universities in the exclusive club.
"It's disappointing," says Go Yoshida, a spokesman for the Office of International Strategic Planning at Nagoya University, one of the 13 selectees. "Quite honestly, Japan is late in the game of globalization in higher education. But the government's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing."
The stakes for this island nation are high. After more than two decades and billions of yen in scholarships, fewer than 4 percent of Japan's university students come from abroad—133,000, well below China, with 223,000, and the United States with 672,000. Just 5 percent of its 353,000 university teachers are foreign, according to ministry of education statistics. Most of those teach English.
At the opposite end of the education pendulum, students here are increasingly staying home: Japanese undergraduate enrollment in American universities has plummeted by more than half since 2000, estimates the ministry. Japanese student enrollment in European institutions is also down.
"Frankly, in my view Japan is going backwards," says Ian de Stains, executive director of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, and one of many observers who believe that despite government rhetoric about internationalization, Japan is becoming more isolationist. "The big danger is that Japan will lose touch and fail to compete globally."
South Korea, with less than half Japan's population, sends twice as many students to the United States. At some American universities, such as Cornell, the number of Japanese students is behind not just the number from China, India, and South Korea, but even from Thailand and tiny Singapore. "The drop is without precedent," says Mark Selden, a senior fellow at Cornell's East Asia program.
Global 30 is supposed to partly remedy those ills, helping Japan reach a government goal of 300,000 foreign students by 2020, while sending the same number of Japanese students abroad.
Participating universities receive an annual grant of 200-400 million yen (between $2.4-million and $4.8-million) annually for five years to employ foreign faculty members and English-speaking support staff, and to create new all-English undergraduate courses. Each university is also required to set up offices outside Japan, both to recruit locally and help Japanese students study in other countries.
Japan's education ministry hopes that its modest commitment will help transform the country's academic landscape by luring more international students and generating more collaboration between foreign and Japanese professors.
"We think those universities will set an example for other colleges by leading with good practice," says Shigeharu Kato, deputy director of the Higher Education Bureau at the ministry. "This practice will then diffuse to other colleges around the country."
With Japan's population falling and dozens of private colleges facing bankruptcy, the government has little choice but to look beyond the country's borders. Education specialists agree that tripling the intake of foreign students will expose their Japanese counterparts to the world, and could help create a cadre of foreign academics who studied in Japan.
But while praising the Global 30 program, some are questioning its focus on elite universities. Priority was given to large institutions with proven research capacity, such as the University of Tokyo and the private Waseda University, says Akiyoshi Yonezawa, an associate professor at the Center for the Advancement of Higher Education in Tohoku University—another of the 13 selected institutions.
Tough Demands
"Smaller and midsized institutions, despite satisfying many of the strong international criteria, were eliminated from the selection process," he says. He adds that some of the country's best universities, such as the Tokyo Institute of Technology, were driven away from the program by its demands, which included raising the percentage of international students to 20 percent and the share of international professors to 10 percent by 2020.
Paul Snowden, dean of Waseda's School of International Liberal Studies, says that institutions that have achieved success attracting international students should have been rewarded for their efforts but instead were disqualified for having already met the ministry's goals.
Half of the students at Mr. Snowden's institution are from abroad, he says. But despite this accomplishment, three other Waseda faculties—the departments of political science; economics, science, and engineering; and social sciences — were selected for the Global 30.
"It was flattering, but disappointing, that basically our curriculum had been imitated by the ministry and disseminated to other places, but we weren't allowed any of the money," Mr. Snowden says.
He questions whether the ratio the School of International Liberal Studies has achieved can be replicated by others. "I'm pretty sure that extreme case is not going to be achieved by more than a handful of institutions in Japan, though."
Despite the concerns about the new program, Mr. Kato of the education ministry says Global 30 is now taking off and is "almost at cruising altitude." And there are some signs to support that.
Nagoya University's Mr. Yoshida says the roughly $3.5-million it received has helped the institution raise its intake of foreign undergraduate and graduate students by 170, and open new offices in Germany and Uzbekistan.
Yet the colleges and the ministry have been frustrated by cost cutting ordered by the Democratic Party of Japan government, which took power last year just after Global 30 was approved. Nagoya's government support, for example, will shrink by 27 percent in its next fiscal year, which starts in April. "We're just starting to launch this and the cuts have come. And we fear more are due," says Mr. Yoshida.
Some believe that the government may be switching priorities to a separate effort called Campus Asia, which is intended to harmonize China, Japan, and South Korea's colleges and ultimately keep more students in the region. A working group from each of the countries is set to meet in China this year, with the project officially starting in April.
Little Fiscal Legroom
With the worst public debt in the industrialized world—900 trillion yen, or $10.6-trillion—Japan has much less fiscal legroom than its competitors. That is likely to mean careful scrutiny of all education spending and a demand that colleges and the education ministry deliver more bang for the government's buck.
Even if this year's cuts were reversed and the government met its financial commitments to Global 30, Mr. Yonezawa of Tohoku University and others doubt that the student targets are attainable without major reform outside the education system. "It is impossible to achieve this sort of internationalization only with Global 30," he says, adding that Japan needs to focus on its second- and third-tier colleges. He also urges major changes in the labor markets and among Japan's conservative companies to give foreign graduates an incentive to stay and work in the country.
Despite these looming issues, Waseda's Mr. Snowden is among many who believe that Japan is still in the race. "Japan is indeed late in the game. But with much interest from Korea and China, I think it can find a new role as an international education base" within the region.
http://chronicle.com/article/A-Slow-Start-for-Japans/124346/
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
New financial assistance program to encourage more students to study abroad
The government is set to introduce a new program that will encourage more students to study abroad by giving them financial assistance to stay overseas for a short period of time, it has been learned.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is launching what it has dubbed a "short visit" program from next fiscal year to boost the number of students who study abroad. It plans to dispatch 7,000 students overseas for a short stay in fiscal 2011. The ministry will include 1.7 billion yen for the program in its budget requests for next fiscal year.
According to the ministry, the number of university students studying abroad had been on the increase until around 1999, but has since declined to an annual 80,000 or so as students are said to be getting more "inward-looking." Even the United States, which is the most popular destination for Japanese students, hosted 30 percent fewer students from Japan in 2008 than in 2004.
While the ministry currently provides a one-year or longer study abroad program, it receives only three times the number of applications as seats available. In a bid to encourage more students to go abroad, the ministry will solicit students who are willing to stay overseas for a period of two weeks to three months so they can get a taste of what an overseas education is like.
Undergraduate students at certain universities -- which have student exchange programs with counterparts overseas and will offer students credits even for a short stay abroad -- will be given financial assistance of up to 80,000 yen for their living costs abroad per month and up to 80,000 yen for one-way airfares.
The ministry's latest white paper on science and technology has pointed out that researchers with overseas experience are more productive, conducting international joint research and coauthoring papers with foreign counterparts, and that the recent trend of Japanese youths becoming more "inward-looking" threatens to undermine Japan's competitiveness in the international community. The government has advocated introducing 300,000 Japanese students into international exchange programs by 2020.
Furthermore, the ministry plans to boost exchanges among universities in Japan, China and South Korea through credit transfers and joint diplomas, allocating about 2 billion yen for the "Campus Asia initiative" in its budget requests for next fiscal year.
Behind the trend of fewer students venturing abroad to study lies the widespread use of the Internet in getting overseas information easily and students' concerns that studying abroad could delay their job hunting activities.
"Some may say our new program is offering too much for students, but students won't be motivated to go abroad and study unless given financial assistance and credit transfers are provided as they face a tight job market," said an official with the ministry.
"Japanese youths lack ambition nowadays. We want to lift their spirits," said Senior Vice Minister of Education Masaharu Nakagawa.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20100906p2a00m0na014000c.html
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology is launching what it has dubbed a "short visit" program from next fiscal year to boost the number of students who study abroad. It plans to dispatch 7,000 students overseas for a short stay in fiscal 2011. The ministry will include 1.7 billion yen for the program in its budget requests for next fiscal year.
According to the ministry, the number of university students studying abroad had been on the increase until around 1999, but has since declined to an annual 80,000 or so as students are said to be getting more "inward-looking." Even the United States, which is the most popular destination for Japanese students, hosted 30 percent fewer students from Japan in 2008 than in 2004.
While the ministry currently provides a one-year or longer study abroad program, it receives only three times the number of applications as seats available. In a bid to encourage more students to go abroad, the ministry will solicit students who are willing to stay overseas for a period of two weeks to three months so they can get a taste of what an overseas education is like.
Undergraduate students at certain universities -- which have student exchange programs with counterparts overseas and will offer students credits even for a short stay abroad -- will be given financial assistance of up to 80,000 yen for their living costs abroad per month and up to 80,000 yen for one-way airfares.
The ministry's latest white paper on science and technology has pointed out that researchers with overseas experience are more productive, conducting international joint research and coauthoring papers with foreign counterparts, and that the recent trend of Japanese youths becoming more "inward-looking" threatens to undermine Japan's competitiveness in the international community. The government has advocated introducing 300,000 Japanese students into international exchange programs by 2020.
Furthermore, the ministry plans to boost exchanges among universities in Japan, China and South Korea through credit transfers and joint diplomas, allocating about 2 billion yen for the "Campus Asia initiative" in its budget requests for next fiscal year.
Behind the trend of fewer students venturing abroad to study lies the widespread use of the Internet in getting overseas information easily and students' concerns that studying abroad could delay their job hunting activities.
"Some may say our new program is offering too much for students, but students won't be motivated to go abroad and study unless given financial assistance and credit transfers are provided as they face a tight job market," said an official with the ministry.
"Japanese youths lack ambition nowadays. We want to lift their spirits," said Senior Vice Minister of Education Masaharu Nakagawa.
http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/national/news/20100906p2a00m0na014000c.html
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