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The story
Ishikawa-based Mitani Corporation has reportedly set starting salaries for kosen (technical college) graduates higher than those of university graduates who are two years older, sparking discussion on 5ch’s News Express+ board. According to the original article, data shows kosen graduates earn roughly 40 million yen less in lifetime wages than university graduates, even as a growing number of companies revise treatment to reward practical skill. Opinions on the thread split over whether academic credentials or hands-on ability should be valued more, with comments ranging from “more useful on the job than university grads” to “kosen grads can never become company president” to “go from kosen to a national graduate school and your credentials end up ahead anyway.”
3 key points from this article
Kosen graduates earn roughly 40 million yen less in lifetime wages than university graduates
But some companies are now setting kosen graduates’ starting pay above that of university grads
Source: business.nikkei.com / Read the original article here
What people said
Hint: it's kosen. The caliber is worlds apart from a regular high school grad.
Seems like there'd be a pretty big gap in usefulness between a high school grad and a kosen grad.
Science/engineering university grads are for research, development, or design — no use for on-site work, right?
Honestly, for everything from sales to office work to skilled trades, high school or even junior-high grads are fine.
Conversely, that means kosen grads are only useful on-site.
Still better than a useless know-it-all university grad.
Honestly, they should start training science/engineering specialists from junior high.
Law and economics can be an afterthought.
Probably kosen just have a higher concentration of good students because there are so few of them — I doubt increasing the numbers would proportionally increase the number of capable grads (´・ω・｀)
Isn't 12 million yen too low for department-head level at a listed company?
30 years ago, if you weren't clearing 10 million yen in your 30s you were basically on the layoff list. My high-school-grad parent was a department head at 40, making just under 20 million yen.
More manufacturers are indeed reevaluating skilled high-school-grad workers and promoting more of them into management. That said, at major companies, promotion slots for management (section chief, department head) are still mostly reserved for university/graduate-school-educated career-track staff. Nationwide, the route from technical-high-school grad to department-head level (12 million yen/year) by one's late 40s/early 50s remains limited to exceptional cases or a narrow track for those who rose through the ranks on-site.
There are idiots on 5ch who talk about special cases as if they're the norm.
Anyone who actually wants to become company president doesn't go to kosen in the first place.
It's not embarrassing. It's just that the bottom rung of blue-collar workers bashing specific people out of jealousy that's unsightly.
I think most blue-collar workers are pretty serious about their work.
I was naive back then. Way too naive.
What an earnest guy. I actually like people like that.
Even graduating from a former Imperial University, your Japanese is pretty rough. No wonder the big companies won't hire you.
At that point they're not really "a kosen grad" anymore. Same as how even if you graduate from an elite prep school like Kaisei or Tsukuba-Komaba, if you don't go on to university — or even drop out — companies will just treat your education level as high school.
If you have to work that hard, it sounds exhausting all the way to retirement. I'd rather live comfortably on a high salary.
Kosen students take 5 years of specialized coursework before entering the workforce. Kanazawa Institute of Technology grads take about 2 years of specialized coursework. It makes sense that kosen grads get paid more.
The son of the cleaning shop near me went from kosen straight into NHK, and the pay was good enough that he built a house in both Tokyo and back home. Right now every country is short on electrical engineers due to demand for data center construction — I saw a news story about one company offering 10 million yen to a fresh technical-high-school grad. In a Nippon Steel-related news piece, I also saw an article about an electrical engineer shortage in the US. Some companies sponsor regional kosen and help maintain their school facilities, and depending on the company, they'll send instructors to teach or provide equipment — really investing in these schools. Some kosen even have cleanrooms. It's not well known, but the ties between kosen and companies are strong.
Kosen also require solid comprehension to master the coursework, so I don't think there's really much difference between university and kosen grads there.
Oh really? So every single university grad has better fundamentals, comprehension, and problem-solving skills than every high school or kosen grad? First I'm hearing of it.
If you're not involved in cutting-edge development tech from an early stage, development is probably impossible, right? High school grads can't get into development roles, and university grads' research is just whatever their professor wants anyway.
That's a lie. Once the manufacturing process is locked in, semiconductor work is basically just tracing lines on a drawing.
If you're going to categorize people, it should be more like logical types, emotional types, and physical types.
More accurately, it's humanities, sciences, and everyone else who's just weak sauce. It's already strange for scrubs who haven't even published a paper to call themselves "humanities" or "sciences" types.
Background and key points of this discussion
Kosen (technical colleges) are 5-year institutions students enter after junior high school, and their institutional standing differs from that of universities. In recent years, driven by a shortage of engineers in electrical, semiconductor, and data-center-related fields, the market value of kosen graduates — who can contribute as immediate assets — has been rising, and Mitani Corporation’s starting-salary reversal can be seen as one example of this trend. Opinions on the thread split over whether academic credentials or practical ability should be valued more: some praised kosen grads’ usefulness on-site, while others pointed out that university grads still hold the advantage when it comes to promotion into management or lifetime earnings. Worth noting — and easily overlooked in debates that simply rank education as high school, kosen, or university — is that kosen grads who go on to graduate school at institutions like Toyohashi University of Technology end up with their final degree counted as a graduate degree.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “🧑🔧 “Kosen grads have status” — Mitani Corp president: starting pay overtakes university grads two years older.”
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