I saw a report in the news that said that 40% of private universities in Japan had failed to fill their student rosters to capacity this year, and several schools failed to fill even 50% of their classrooms. For years people have been talking about the problems Japan’s higher education world would likely experience as the population of students falls, and the effects have finally begun to be felt. Having very little in the way of natural resources to fall back on, Japan has always invested heavily in its people, and the country has had enormous success with its competition-based test system which encourages students to spend years studying for university entrance exams so they can get into a famous school. This system is dependent on there being more students than positions to fill at top-notch universities, however, and as the number of students in Japanese universities falls, schools will presumably have to lower their academic standards in order to fill their classrooms. In theory this means that eventually, any student wishing to attend Tokyo or Waseda University will be able to do so easily, without spending years studying. (If Japanese no longer need to study hard to get into college, how will they make anime stories about students who can’t study because of being distracted by cute girls?) To combat the problem Japan’s Ministry of Education should be finding any excuse to close existing universities that fall below a certain threshold of educational quality, and yet they’re doing the opposite, allowing more to be accreddited every year.
I’d have trouble studying if these girls were always bugging me, too.
