The first day of the semester should be one of the year’s busiest, but it is immediately clear here at St. Thomas University that something is badly wrong. Apart from a sprinkling of students chatting near the entrance, the grounds are eerily quiet—closer to the atmosphere of a retirement home than a bustling city campus. Footsteps echo off the walls of deserted corridors. Students huddle around professors at the front of nearly empty classrooms.
Long before this small private college near Osaka announced, in the summer, that it was no longer accepting freshmen, it was struggling. Established in 1962, St Thomas carved out a niche among its bigger, more prestigious local rivals by focusing on literature and foreign-language studies.
But enrollment has been falling for several years, hit hard by a demographic tsunami that threatens to overwhelm one of the world’s largest higher-education sectors: Japan is running out of 18-year-olds.
According to the ministry of education, 47 percent of Japan’s roughly 550 private four-year universities are falling below their government-set recruitment targets, the highest ever figure. Over 40 percent are reportedly in debt, and many are a bank loan away from the fate of St. Thomas, one of five Japanese colleges to stop accepting students this year.
“There are many more universities like this,” warns Teiji Kariya, director of the university’s office of the president. “We are the tip of the iceberg.”
Worst-case scenarios forecast that one-third of Japan’s private universities could go bankrupt or merge in the next decade. But the government, which has the power to close failing colleges, has so far taken a laissez-faire approach, refusing to either rescue them or pull the plug.
In the meantime, the enrollment crisis has reached “ridiculous” proportions, says Bruce Stronach, dean of Temple University’s Japan campus. “The government must decide very soon: Those colleges that are going to die should die.”
The crisis has been slower to affect the public universities, which receive greater public support, have better brand recognition, and are considered more prestigious among Japanese students. Still, some public universities have begun to tighten their belts by, for example, eliminating engineering departments, which are expensive to run.
In the absence of state intervention, private universities across Japan, especially outside the major urban areas, are in crisis management. Faculty pay has been frozen or cut, all-important bonuses have been suspended, and resources trimmed to the bone. Short-term contracts for professors are becoming more common. Thousands of students from Japan’s giant neighbor China are being recruited to fill empty classroom seats.
But that solution has created its own set of problems. At some institutions, international students, mostly Chinese, are failing to turn up for lectures, using their student visas instead as cover to work. One assistant professor at Aomori University, in northern Japan, says about half the students in some faculties are Chinese.
“A lot are working more than they are studying,” said the professor, who requested anonymity. “The school doesn’t acknowledge there is a problem because they just want to fill up the classrooms.” The picture is replicated throughout the nation, he said. “Local universities can’t attract students, so they feel that they have no choice.”
Japan has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates and a shortage of children so severe that the government recently created a cabinet position to deal with it. The problem has rippled through each layer of the education system, shutting elementary, junior high, and high schools and now finally reaching colleges.
Since peaking in 1992 at 2.1 million, the number of 18-year-olds has plummeted by more than 700,000. The population shrank last year by a record 51,317, and Japan has yet to embrace the solution tried by other developed countries: mass immigration.
“There’s a lot of bitterness about this,” says Martin Weatherby, an associate professor in St. Thomas’s department of human development. “We knew 10 years ago that 2009 was the crunch year. Everybody in Japan knew that.”
Free-Market Fundamentalism
Why did the government ignore the looming population crisis and continue to crank out licenses to the private-university sector, which has grown by a third since the late 1980s? Some in the industry blame free-market fundamentalism.
“The policy was that there would be no regulation by the government, and no intervention,” recalls Hiromitsu Takizawa, senior analyst at the Research Institute for Independent Higher Education, a think tank run by the Association of Private Universities of Japan.
Mr. Takizawa says the government encouraged overcapacity in the belief that competition would winnow out the weak. “The result is overcompetition. And they have ruled out a rescue scheme or a bailout. A shakeout is inevitable.”
Japan’s ministry of education declined to comment on any of these issues, referring The Chronicle instead to a document compiled by one of its many advisory councils, released in June this year.
The report cites the declining population but shies away from a broad solution, suggesting instead that the Japanese market is still immature, with a very low rate of participation in higher education by students over the age of 25. (It stands at 2 percent of the total student body, far below an average of 20.7 reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) Just 2.6 percent of combined undergraduate and masters’ students come from overseas, it adds, compared with an OECD average of 7.3 percent.
Most observers agree that Japanese colleges would benefit greatly from more mature and foreign students, but say that structural barriers prevent them from making much impact. Boosting the mature-student intake, for example, would require enormous changes in corporate Japan, where people traditionally work at the same company for life.
St. Thomas is among the first wave of private colleges to bear the brunt of what Mr. Takizawa calls the government’s failed experiment. Its intake of freshmen plummeted from over 400 a decade ago to 110 this year. There are now 542 undergraduate students enrolled, roughly half its government-set quota. (In Japan, a university’s accreditation is tied to its enrollment numbers, which are set by the government. If a college falls below 50 percent of that quota, the government can revoke accreditation and cut financial support.)
The president’s office explains that as the number of local high-school graduates began to fall, the bigger, more prestigious colleges such as Osaka University began lowering the academic bar.
“Students who once couldn’t get into those universities suddenly could, so they went there instead,” explains Mr. Kariya. “We were left behind.”
Management battled to keep St. Thomas afloat, freezing staff pay, transforming its curriculum, bringing in consultants, and starting an entirely new department of human development—even hiring new teaching staff as late as last year. An ill-fated name change (from Eichi University) in 2007 failed to halt the decline and led to accusations of mismanagement.
Whatever road the university took, however, there was no changing the hard facts, says Kathy Yamane, director of the college’s Center for Cross-Cultural Exchange. “The No. 1 problem is demographics. There just aren’t enough students to go around.”
In response, St. Thomas began recruiting undergraduates heavily from abroad. President Takehiko Oda led at least one university delegation to China himself. Today 195 foreign students, mostly Chinese, study at the university—one-third of the student body and a vast increase from the 10 or so who were here a decade ago.
Mr. Kariya admits that there have been some problems with immigration and says St. Thomas has ruled out the possibility of further increasing its enrollment of foreign students to stave off bankruptcy.
“We think we have reached the limit of what we can handle,” he says, adding that the education ministry would in any case “have problems” with such a decision. “Their general policy is that Japanese universities should be for Japanese students.”
Conflicting Strategies
Such views appear to throw cold water on a pledge two years ago by then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda to nearly triple Japan’s foreign-student enrollment to 300,000 by the end of the next decade. Privately, many higher-education specialists call the pledge unworkable, saying Japan is simply not equipped, structurally or psychologically, to deal with such an influx without major government help. Most cite housing high on a list of problems that must be solved: Apartments are expensive, and Japanese real-estate companies in rural areas still often refuse to rent to non-Japanese customers.
Private colleges admit off the rec ord that they don’t see China or the rest of Asia as the solution to their problems.
“Many small private colleges have an unofficial ceiling on students from Asia of 10 percent,” says an official at the troubled Tokyo Fuji University, who also requested anonymity. “Accept more, and the reputation of the college declines. It becomes self-defeating because Japanese students start believing the college is poor.”
Mr. Weatherby concurs: “The more foreign students you have, the harder it is to get Japanese 18-year-olds to come. That’s just a sad fact.”
Meanwhile, the biggest private colleges have begun setting up affiliate junior-high and high schools in a bid to snag the best students early. Some are offering schoolchildren an iron-clad guarantee of a fast track to university if they sign up early—a sign of competition to come.
With such a lack of options, some colleges are pinning their hopes on Japan’s new government, which took office two months ago, ending more than 50 years of almost unbroken conservative rule.
But while the new government has promised “drastic” reform to slash Japan’s tuition, among the highest in the world, it has yet to dive into the enrollment crisis.
“I have seen no concrete changes so far,” says Mr. Takizawa, who nevertheless says that criticism of the previous government’s approach is growing. “Many accept that excessive competition has developed negative effects.”
Whatever happens, it is likely to come too late to save St. Thomas. The president’s office hopes the college might be taken over by a larger university, allowing it to continue as a going concern. In the meantime, many of its professors are looking for work elsewhere.
“It’s a pity, because it is a special place,” says Nobumichi Koyanagi, a second-year student. “It’s small and intimate, and our relationship with the teachers is friendly.”
Is that why he chose to come here? “No,” he says, laughing sheepishly. “I couldn’t get in anywhere else.”
