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The story
Waseda Saga Junior & Senior High School, located in Karatsu City, Saga Prefecture, is known for sitting right next to the ruins of Karatsu Castle. Of its roughly 1,100 students, about 700 live in dormitories, and more than half of them reportedly hail from the greater Tokyo area. Despite being an affiliated school of Waseda University, only around 60% of students are said to advance to the university via recommendation. The article quotes locals saying “the Waseda brand is energizing the local community.” On 5ch, discussion ranged widely — from whether the brand power of private-university-affiliated schools still holds up today, to comparisons with Keio University’s popularity, to theories that tuition-free policies are shifting popularity toward private schools with newer facilities.
Is Waseda on the rise in Kyushu high school sports too? A web editor living in Karatsu reveals the current state of “Waseda Saga” amid a surge of applicants from the Tokyo area: “It’s true that the Waseda brand is energizing the local community”
■ A sense of unity unique to Waseda
The Waseda Saga campus sits in a prime location right beneath Karatsu Castle. This spot was originally home to Karatsu Higashi High School, a prefectural school known as “Karatsu’s top college-prep school.” However, when that school became a combined junior-senior high school in 2006, it relocated, and Waseda Saga Junior & Senior High moved into the vacated site.
Source: dailyshincho.jp / Original article here
What people said
Yeah, I think so too. They'll probably use this as chat fodder at the next Waseda alumni association (Tomonkai) meetup.
I'll bring it up with the chapter secretary and some internal-track alumni at this month's alumni meeting myself.
Huh, times sure have changed.
You'd think the Waseda brand would already be tarnished among a reasonably sharp parents' generation, what with the Hirosue Ryoko scandal and the "Super Free" gang-rape case (both infamous Waseda-linked scandals).
But even Waseda/Keio and the MARCH schools have basically become Kanto-local universities now — the share of students from other regions keeps shrinking.
Because Saga is the hometown of Okuma Shigenobu, Waseda's founder.
Though why specifically Karatsu is still a mystery.
That's because they hold you back a ton and won't let you graduate easily.
But honestly, at private universities, the general-admission students are basically the paying customers, not the core. Keio's especially like that — the ones with real "citizenship" are the internal-track kids from affiliated schools, while outside admits are just customers. And the recommendation students who bring the school sports glory get treated like honorary citizens.
Keio cut back on sports-recommendation slots at the university level and expanded them at its affiliated high schools instead. Basically, top regional athletes who used to join Keio at the university level now join at the high school level and shine from there.
Fukuzawa Yukichi's actual birthplace is Osaka. Osaka does have a city campus for working adults, but there's no affiliated-school pipeline from high school there.
Keio has an image of being an urban-type university, so building one out in the Kyushu countryside would be tough. If anywhere, it'd more likely be somewhere in Kansai.
"Former Imperial Universities" vary wildly in level too. Among students who got INTO Kyushu University, only about 10% also passed Waseda's entrance exam; for Osaka University it's around 20% — that's typical for the regional former-imperial schools. Waseda rejects 80-90% of its own admits, so by exam-industry standards it's obviously not a safety school (if that many successful applicants elsewhere still fail it, rejects certainly wouldn't pass) — it's actually a tough "reach school."
A true "Keio Boy" has to have come up through Keio's Yochisha (the elementary school) — nothing less counts.
I seriously thought "Yochisha" meant kindergarten, not that it goes all the way through elementary school. And yet, little old me is a Keio alum too ("jukuin," the term Keio grads use for themselves).
That school actually isn't part of Ryukoku University's system. It does technically fall under the broader "Ryukoku Sogo Gakuen" umbrella group, so it's more like a distant relative.
Moving into a boarding school in Saga where only 60% get into Waseda University — all the way from Tokyo, no less? Are these people serious lol
Hundreds of kids moving from Tokyo to Saga, and only 60% get the internal track to Waseda. Missing out on the recommendation must be pretty rough.
So that's what Waseda Osaka is like. No wonder it's not popular.
But those kids might actually be sharper than the local Saga students.
Rough if you only get a recommendation slot for a department you didn't even want.
The name really does sound super rustic when you think about it — "wase" rice paddies and all.
Same as with the university itself — half the successful applicants turn it down, so the real effective deviation score isn't as high as it looks. And Keio Girls' School in particular admits a lot of students via recommendation too.
I mean, it's still Waseda though.
Even top schools like Kita Senior High School produce some successful applicants, but a lot of them don't actually enroll — in Kansai, public national/prefectural universities take priority.
Background and Talking Points on This Topic
Waseda Saga has its roots in 2006, when the prefectural Karatsu Higashi High School — then a respected college-prep school — became a combined junior-senior high and relocated, opening the way for Waseda Saga to open in Saga Prefecture, the hometown of Waseda’s founder Okuma Shigenobu. In the thread, opinion split over whether the roughly 60% internal-advancement rate to the university (via recommendation) should be judged as a mark of the school’s strength as a college-prep institution, or as a reflection of its brand as a university affiliate. Comparisons were also drawn with Keio, which has recently cut university-level sports-recommendation slots while expanding them at its affiliated high schools — a reminder that the mechanics of private-university affiliate schools differ from one university to the next, a nuance that’s easy to overlook. Some pointed out that tuition-free education policies may be shifting popularity toward private schools with newer facilities, suggesting that “the Waseda brand is alive and well” doesn’t fully capture the reality.
※This article is an excerpt and summary based on the 5ch (Entertainment/Sports Speed+) thread “Is Waseda on the rise in Kyushu high school sports too? A web editor in Karatsu reveals the current state of “Waseda Saga” amid a surge of Tokyo-area applicants: “It’s true that the Waseda brand is energizing the local community”.”
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