Higher education, university, science and society - is Japan fallen behind?
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Ken Ho
5 Nov 2023

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own

## What is a university and what is it for? Do we need higher education?
Many politicians and media make us to believe that a university degree is to train young people to have right skill set for them to enter industry. Young people will in turn get a good stable and high paying job with a bright career. However, is that correct or even realistic?

As someone who had work and taught in a univeristy, I would categorically say that universities have no real idea what projects or technologies that Apple, Google, Amazon or Toyota, Sony will do in the next 5 years. Therefore, university will not know what technology and skill set that they will need to teach students in order to meet demand of industries and market place in 3-4 year's time. It is ridiculously unrealistic to expect university know what companies will need to satisfy market demands of the future.

In reality, university mainly teaches foundamental knowledge and latest research and development to their students. They expect graduates to use those knowledge and skills set to develop new technologies and to innovate new processes, building entirely new industries of the future. Graduates are expected to adapt and acquire/learn new knowledge and new skills in an ever changing world. Graduates are expected to continue to learn new skils and accumate new knowledge over their career.

### Should young people study for a degree if it doesn't guarantee a good paying job or career?
My opinion is yes. Higher education is about better oneself. Learn something that one has a passion for and choose a subject that one interests in. It is more important to follow one's interest and passion as they will drive and shape one's career.

## Who should then pay for higher education?
Unfortunately, there is a cost element in this. In Japan there is no real government support for young people to get a degree, so there is a constant justification for how a degree will make a difference monetary. The usual narrative is that it would bring a higher paying job, so it turns the argument to become an individual's investment.

However, the society suffers if we don't invest in young people as our own future depends on them. A country is fundamentally defind by its people and culture. Investing in higher education, helping young people to reach their true passion and potential, that should benefit the society and its citizens as a whole.

In other countries, especially in EU, many countries provide subsidies for young people to get a degree and a degree course is mostly subsidised by the government.

In the UK, it becomes a hybrid, university charges tuition fees with a cap and students have to pay with a loan that get deducted in future taxation.

Japan has the lowest public expenditure on education. Therefore Japan relies mostly on its citizen to self-fund their young.

## Should a university dedicated on teaching? Or should they dedicated entirely on research instead?
University is very much defined by their research. Without research, it will become a school! University is a place for people to exchange ideas, explore the unknown, finding the limit of our present knowledge. It is, therefore, essential that university teaches what is the latest in our understanding of our knowledge. Without doing their own research, professors and lecturers will not know what is relevant. In return graduates can utilise these cutting edge knowledge and help to develop new innovations and even new industries.

## Why do we fund research and how does it related to society as a whole?
Research is an investment of the future by the society. UK spent much money on research and when Covid19 hit, they had unviersity research groups in vaccine research in-place to tackle the problems that UK had funded for years. Similarly when Fukushima earthquake struck Japan, there were university experts to advice the government on nuclear fallout, future energy sources, etc. Climate change is another examples that research provides society with warning and predictions that shape countries policy and even technology that we use, e.g. EV cars, solar panels, wind turbine for renewable energy.

For much of the G7 countries, research drives the next wave of innovations and new technologies which in turn create new industries.

## How does a unversity research identify and solve societial issues?
University research does not try to solve today's immediate problems, they normally try to find new understanding or approach that will solve a whole range of problems in the future. In many ways, **future** is normally some decades away. However, there are always problems that society wants to solve and they seem unsolvable, curing cancer, revesing climate change, sustainable renewable energy, predicting earthquake, aging soceity, etc. Identifying research areas that will have an impact on society should not be difficult to target.

In some ways, having a wide porfolio of research areas can help to cover unforeseeable events. Japanese research tends to target more specific narrower areas. During the Covid19 outbreak, Japan's lack of vaccine research shows how targeted research may get caught short.

On the other hand, there are probably only a handful of universities around the world that can excel on every subject, e.g. Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Harvard, Stanford, UCLA, UC Berkely, Todai, Kyoto U, etc.

Maybe a university is better to concentrate on a specific area and become world leading instead, e.g. LSE, MIT, CalTech, Princeton, etc, they only concentrate on a few subjects and made them world leading.

## Is Japanese universities fallen behind?
Japanese universities are not doing particular well in Global Science Paper Ranking. There are many different rankings. The most used and quoted in the media is the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings (ref: 1). However, many unviersity policy makers look at the Shanghai Ranking (re:2) instead. The reason is that Shanghai ranking actually measure research output and not based on other metrics, like teaching, international staff, international student, etc. It doesn't provide any emprical evidence why why international staff or international student enhance the quality of research. In many ways, it is seen as being benefial to have a diversity of culture and opinions as a university.

If the whole objective is to boost rankings, it would be easier to just increase the number of international staff and students in Japanese universities to boost their rankings.

However, if you truely want to have research excellence, one should look at Shanghai ranking instead. In order to boost this ranking, one has to do hard scientific work. Another way to help Japanese universities to achieve that is probably to have more international collaboration research projects. This will help Japanese research getting publish and to keep pace of global research trend and activities. However, I beleive that they are not well supported by government funding agencies and many schemes have much limitations. I believe that MEXT funding cannot be used outside of Japan and there is no incentives for Japanese academics to have international collaborations as faculty and academics do not get extra bonus or promotion points to have international collaborators. In many ways, international collaborations only creates more administrative work. One example of success is OIST. OIST has a international president and in many ways, the faculties are mainly international. The downside of OIST is that it doesn't seem to have much connections with Japanese academic community and this may not be sustainable politically in the long term.

There is another way to look at whether Japanese universites are fallen behind by looking at Japanese high tech industries. Are Japanese high tech industries lacking behind? If Japanese graduates are not competitive with their international counterpart, Japanese high tech industries will suffer. In a way they are behind in the form of software engineering and IT. This may well be because both Todai and Kyoto university do not have Computer Science Department. They only have Computational Science department instead. In many ways Japan is also behind in AI too, although they used to lead the world in the 80s/90s. Funding dried up by the end of the 90s.

In my limited experience though, Japanese industries are pretty competitive in all areas of science and technology. They may not be top in all areas but they are within the top 3 or top 5 in the world. Japanese graduates are well trained in general. Maybe Japan is not really lacking behind, it is more to do with the media than Japan has an actual problem. However, it is certain that other countries, like China, India, are catching up.

# Reference:
1.[Times Higher Education World University Rankings]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Higher_Education_World_University_Rankings)
2. [Shanghai Ranking/Academic Ranking of World Universities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Universities)
3. [International Comparison UK Research Base 2022]( https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/628cd2828fa8f55615524e8c/international-comparison-uk-research-base-2022-accompanying-note